A Novel ICT Approach to the Assessment of Mobility in Diverse Health Care Environments

ICT and medical experts have to work together in order to meet the challenges imposed by the demographic change. The Ambient Timed Up & Go (aTUG) approach, whose development and evaluation is presented and discussed in this paper, is an example for such cooperation which aims at making existing medical processes more effective and at enabling seamless provision of care between professional and domestic environments. aTUG is an approach and apparatus that provides technical support for execution of geriatric mobility assessment tests in professional and domestic environments and that yields the advantages of being more objective and more detailed while saving time. Additionally, aTUG enables physicians to include assessment data from domestic environments into their decisions, especially to enable more early prevention and sustainable rehabilitation. However, the explanatory power of assessment results from domestic environments is still unclear and their integration into medical decisions is discussed within this paper.