This project’s research question is: Are mobility assessments acquired in non-clinical environments markers for clinically acquired cognitive or motor measures? This project will examine correlations between mobility measures acquired in the clinic and at home and measures of cognition. 

This project is in collaboration with Prof Walter Maetzler's (MD) Neurogeriatrics Kiel research group in Germany. This project is employing The Cognitive and Motor Interactions in the Older Population Study (ComOn) which is examining 1000 geriatric inpatients in hospitals in Germany, Italy, Portugal and Brazil. 

The interaction between physical activity and age-associated functional impairment remain largely unexplained. This is in part due to the subjective nature of clinical assessment and the supervised environment in which it occurs, such as a hospital setting. Development of novel screening tests which can objectively quantify changes from health to pathology in non-clinical environments are needed. However, gait analysis algorithms have only been validated within a supervised clinical setting in a large clinical population. Furthermore, clinical meaningful differences between age and disease groups have not been objectively quantified and correlations between clinical measures are unknown. This project aims to (1) develop and validate gait analysis algorithms for the evaluation of unsupervised mobility and (2) validate these algorithms against clinically established motor and cognitive parameters. Signal processing and statistical methods will be employed to examine this motor-cognitive relationship in a large clinical dataset of participants over 70 years old which will comprise of supervised inpatient and unsupervised at home assessments. Novel outcomes may include a signal processing algorithm developed to automatically extract gait parameters, a statistical model which highlights significant motor-cognitive correlations and predicts clinically meaningful difference in age and disease groups.