Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Jul 25, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 29, 2019 - Sep 23, 2019
Date Accepted: Apr 14, 2021
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
A smart shoe insole to monitor frail older adults walking speed: results of two evaluation phases completed in a living-lab and through a 12-week pilot study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Frail older adult prevention programs effectiveness depends on our ability to monitor health indicators over time. Commercial devices do not meet our needs in terms of accuracy and acceptability. We developed a shoe insole to monitor walking speed and differentiate active walking from trampling.
Objective:
To assess our device acceptability prior to field evaluation.
Methods:
We designed a two-phase living laboratory test using a mixed approach: (i) nine older adults in a test smart house; (ii) three older adults at home.
Results:
The results of the semi-structured interviews revealed acceptability issues. Despite the thinness of the insole (< 2.5 mm), flexibility and thickness were judged negatively and fears of longer term discomfort were expressed. At home, the three participants reported that they had indeed worn the insoles for the entire one-month follow-up period without early withdrawal (Phase 2). According to the insole data, they objectively wear the insole for 22, 13 and 13 days out of 30 respectively. We were able to measure remotely the total ‘active walking’ time (as opposed to trampling and therefore different from the number of steps) and the average walking speed (calculated from the average step length obtained during the calibration protocol). Questionnaires results underlined low scores for the reliability outcomes, mainly associated with synchronization problems. Conversely, high scores were reported for usability.
Conclusions:
Our results revealed mixed results concerning the acceptability of instrumented insoles in this population for which we did not have clinical data beyond a few hours of testing. Since this type of device is increasingly focusing the interest of researchers, our results will be useful for future developments. This ‘optimized reality’ assessment between the laboratory tests and our ‘real life’ ongoing clinical trial revealed technical and acceptability problems and allowed us to make iterative modifications to the device. Clinical Trial: ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT02316600
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.