Evaluation of the Importance of Stopping Elderly Accidents, Deaths, and Injuries (STEADI)–Based Factors in Wearable Fall Risk Assessment: Secondary Data Analysis

Description

Nozhan Ghoreishi and co-authors ask which fall risk factors a wearable system should measure, in a 2026 analysis. Clinical guidance under the STEADI program screens gait, balance, strength, fear of falling, and fall history. Most wearables, though, track gait alone. The team built a dataset of twenty-four older adults labeled low or high risk by two standard tests. Eighteen features were drawn from plantar pressure recordings.

A random forest using all features sorted risk with about eighty-eight percent accuracy. Importance analysis crowned a fear-of-falling feature, the right foot flat phase ratio, as the top signal. A strength measure came second, while classic gait features missed the top ten entirely. Single-factor models told a similar story, with fear of falling matching the full model. Differences between factor models were not statistically clear, though. The authors present the work as preliminary design guidance for clinically aligned wearables.

Catalog record

Source: https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC13291733