Background Knowledge about the causal factors leading to falls is still limited, and fall prevention interventions urgently need to be more effective to limit the otherwise increasing burden caused by falls in older people. To identify individual fall risk, it is important to understand the complex interplay of fall-related factors. Although fall events are common, they are seldom observed, and fall reports are often biased. Due to the rapid development of wearable inertial sensors, an objective approach to capture fall events and the corresponding circumstances is provided. Objective The aim of this work is to operationalize a prototypical dynamic fall risk model regarding 4 ecologically valid real-world scenarios (opening a door, slipping, tripping, and usage of public transportation). We hypothesize that individual fall risk is associated with an interplay of intrinsic risk factors, activity, and environmental factors that can be estimated by using data measured within a laboratory simulation setting. Methods We will recruit 30 community-dwelling people aged 60 years or older. To identify several fall-related intrinsic fall risk factors, appropriate clinical assessments will be selected. The experimental setup is adaptable so that the level of fall risk for each activity and each environmental factor is adjustable. By different levels of difficulty, the effect on the risk of falling will be investigated. An 8-camera motion tracking system will be used to record absolute body motions and limits of stability. All laboratory experiments will also be recorded by inertial sensors (L5, dominant leg) and video camera. Logistic regression analyses will be used to model the association between risk factors and falls. Continuous fall risk will be modeled by generalized linear regression models using margin of stability as outcome parameter. Results The results of this project will prove the concept and establish methods to further use the dynamic fall risk model. Recruitment and measurement initially began in October 2020 but were halted because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Recruitment and measurements recommenced in October 2022, and by February 2023, a total of 25 of the planned 30 subjects have been measured. Conclusions In the field of fall prevention, a more precise fall risk model will have a significant impact on research leading to more effective prevention approaches. Given the described burden related to falls and the high prevalence, considerable improvements in fall prevention will have a significant impact on individual quality of life and also on society in general by reducing institutionalization and health care costs. The setup will enable the analysis of fall events and their circumstances ecologically valid in a laboratory setting and thereby will provide important information to estimate the individual instantaneous fall risk. International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID) DERR1-10.2196/46930

Competencies play an important role for successfully mastering tasks in organizations. However, when designing processes as part of Business Process Management projects, tasks and roles are modelled but not the required competencies for mastering certain processes or tasks. Particularly in the age of Digital Transformation, this leads to insecurities and fears of employees in the change process as it is not clear what is needed to stay employed. In our approach, we extend current modeling practices by introducing competencies into business process models. For this purpose, we propose a specific modeling object as this improves readability and visibility of competencies. Additionally, we provide a data model and a competency model to ease the modeling process. The approach was successfully validated in expert interviews with academics and practitioners.

Combining a traditional treadmill with a virtual reality (VR) environment comes with many obstacles. In order to analyse a personsgaitalaboratoryevaluationframeworkwasimplementedbasedontheaforementionedscenario. Theactualmovement information is being matched with the virtual movement speed in order to create an immersive walking environment. In this iteration of the framework a Woodway treadmill was used in combination with the HTC Vive Pro 2 VR headset. The framework will be used for cognitive and motoric tests which leads to many questions regarding the security aspect and the overall feeling of uncertainty while walking on a treadmill without being able to see the walkable surface. In order to give the participants a better understanding of the treadmill we decided to implement a mixed reality approach for this iteration.

In many virtual reality applications the movement is done with simple pointing and teleportation to the designated location. On the other side there is a need of combining treadmill walking with virtual reality environments to train participants in demanding but controlled walking scenarios. In this demonstration we therefore combined the VR capabilities of the Oculus Quest system with a mechanical treadmill in order to create a framework for cognitive and motoric testing and training. A test subject has the control over increasing and decreasing the speed at any given time during the experiment. A supervisor can actively communicate with the test subject with simple lines of text and also has the means to intervene in case of emergency

Physical activity of children and adolescents is an important part of the personal and physical development. Nevertheless, a trend has been observed in recent years that is worrying. With increasing age of children and adolescents, the motivation for physical activity decreases. But how can children and adolescents be motivated to engage in physical activity? For this purpose, we have considered developing a playful app that not just counts the steps of the user, but especially focus on group dynamics while motivating or challenging each other. To do this, we explore items that users can earn with steps to gain an advantage. At the same time, we explore how these items affect the motivation of physical activity. This paper presents the results of a workshop that was made with early adolescents to research their motivation and an approach that uses a mobile smartphone. As a result, hypotheses are presented to the established game mechanics to be tested on the basis of the prototype. These should be evaluated and defined more precisely in the next step with the help of a survey.

Current deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) approaches enable accurate marker-free estimation of body poses observed in an image. We think that this marker-free estimation approach develops all its potential in the field of pose estimation, if this is possible in real time and on a mobile device. In this work, we focus on the implementation of a modern CNN approach for the body pose estimation and a redesign of the CNN architecture, so that it can be applied on a mobile device. The results of our experiments show that even current smartphones can propagate our architecture in reasonable time.

AIMS:The primary objective of the SmartSenior@home study was to examine the acceptance of the SmartSenior system by older adults.METHODS:Twenty-eight partners from industry and research, including the health care sector, worked collaboratively to implement services aiming to maximize independence in old age. The prospective cohort study was conducted in Potsdam, Germany, with n = 35 older adults between 55 and 88 years of age in their apartments. All participants underwent extensive pre- and post-study visits with in-home interviews, functional assessments for cognition, fine motor skills, and mobility as well as responding to questionnaires on user acceptance and quality of life.RESULTS:The results indicate moderate-to-high user acceptance for the SmartSenior system. In particular, the services for general assistance and health, such as audio/video communication, blood pressure monitoring, and communication with a health professional, were rated as very attractive. Less used and less accepted services were those promoting social interaction and reminder services.CONCLUSION:Besides reliable functioning of the SmartSenior system, the availability of a confidant seems to be the most significant acceptance factor. As one conclusion of this trial, it is possible to develop, integrate, and test an infrastructure for ambient assisted living services in real life.

When a cognitive and a motor task like walking or keeping one's balance are performed concurrently, performance usually deteriorates. Older adults have often been shown to prioritize their motor performance in such dual-task situations, possibly to protect themselves from falls. The current study investigates whether these prioritization behaviors can still be observed when several challenges are combined. Younger (20-30 years old) and older adults (60-70 years old; n = 24 in each group) were asked to walk through virtual environments with and without a cognitive load (3-back task). Walking difficulty was increased by walking on an elevated surface or on a narrow as opposed to a broad track, or both. Walking instructions emphasized speed and accuracy (avoiding missteps). No instruction was given concerning which performance dimension should be prioritized during dual-task trials. Participants decreased their 3-back performance while walking. Younger adults maintained their walking speed on elevated surfaces and were able to keep the number of missteps low, even when walking on a narrow track while performing the cognitive task. Older adults increased their walking speed on elevated relative to even surfaces and committed more missteps under cognitive load. Results suggest that task prioritization might fail in healthy older adults if several challenges are combined in high-risk settings.

One of the most stressing challenges in our culture is the demographic change. On the one hand, people become older and older, at the same time less young people are available in order to support the elderly. Currently, this fact already provides a number of social impacts that need to be solved in the near future. This paper concentrates on the integration of mobile devices in scenarios that allow elderly people to age successfully. Here, the term “aging successfully” refers to broad range of aspects from health to social life of elderly people. A special focus of this paper lies in the question whether services deployed to a mobile device provide advantages in the area of aging successfully. In order to answer this question, both technical challenges are explained and solved by example architectures, and scenarios that benefit from services deployed to mobile devices are explained.

Over the the last century, the average lifespan extended remarkably. The economic and social implications of living longer are vast, and include offering new prospects to make latent potential in old age accessible both to senior citizens and to society. Growing evidence suggests that the brain retains its capability to change from experience into old age, a finding that encourages targeting the elderly for interventions such as physical activity which is known to impact cognitive and neural decline. In this work we suggest intervening on the basis of these findings by means of intelligent assistive technology. Therefore, we propose a system architecture for a mobile context-aware cognitive assistant (CACA) to assess and enhance cognitive functioning of older individuals. In our view, tailored context-aware assistance can activate latent physical and cognitive potential through a combination of challenge and support, aimed at enhancing individual motivation to pursue a sustainable lifestyle.

With advancing adult age, sensorimotor functioning, spatial processing, and the motivation to explore new environments decline, leading to impaired spatial navigation skills. Using a controlled virtual-world laboratory equipped with a treadmill interface, we examined how assistive navigation technologies differing in cognitive demand affect walking regularity and navigation performance in younger and older adults. Relative to an assistive device with low cognitive demands, older, but not younger adults'navigation performance decreased with a cognitively more demanding device. Furthermore, older adults showed higher gait irregularity than younger adults, especially with the cognitively demanding device. We conclude that assistive navigation devices show promise in supporting older adults' pedestrian mobility if aging-induced increments in cognitive demands of spatial navigation and postural control are considered.

We assessed age-related differences in adults in familiarization to treadmill walking within virtual environments (VE), and examined whether treadmill walking after familiarization resembles overground walking. Seventeen younger and 17 older adults walked at preferred speed on an overground walkway and afterwards walked at the same speed for 20 min on a treadmill coupled to a VE. A motion capture system was used to measure spatio-temporal gait parameters. On the treadmill, both younger and older adults initially displayed decreased step length and increased step width, cadence, and time in double support relative to overground walking. Except for time in double support, step characteristics approached overground walking-behavior with a negatively accelerated trend. After 15 min of treadmill walking, changes became minor corresponding to less than 1% deviations to individuals' overground walking. At the end of familiarization, average differences in step length, cadence, and double support relative to overground walking were reduced to less than 5 percent in both age groups. For step width, younger adults approximated overground walking after 20 min more closely than older adults, probably reflecting larger initial differences between treadmill and overground walking among older adults. We conclude (a) that 20 min of familiarization to treadmill walking in a VE are sufficient to reach stable walking patterns resembling those observed in overground walking, but that some differences between the two settings remain, especially in older adults; (b) that sufficient familiarization to the treadmill is needed to ascertain the validity and generalizability of comparisons between younger and older adults.