HealthWalk: Promoting Health and Mobility through Sensor-Based Rollator Walker Assistance
This addresses mobility and health issues for older adults and individuals with physical disabilities, but it is incremental as it builds on existing sensor integration approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of poor posture and fall risks in rollator walker users by proposing a sensor-based assistance system, presenting an early prototype for data collection with various patient groups.
Rollator walkers allow people with physical limitations to increase their mobility and give them the confidence and independence to participate in society for longer. However, rollator walker users often have poor posture, leading to further health problems and, in the worst case, falls. Integrating sensors into rollator walker designs can help to address this problem and results in a platform that allows several other interesting use cases. This paper briefly overviews existing systems and the current research directions and challenges in this field. We also present our early HealthWalk rollator walker prototype for data collection with older people, rheumatism, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson patients, and individuals with visual impairments.