Position statement: Physical activity monitoring of elderly patients - 3 tricks to advance the field?

Nowadays, many research groups are actively working on assistive technologies for the elderly. Technologies for capturing and understanding physical activity are an important aspect of this research field. Most often, they employ accelerometers or cameras. Applications include both diagnosis as well as long term monitoring, in the natural home environment of the elderly, in the nursing home and in the hospital. The position statement argues in favor of three possibble aproaches for improving the current state of the art: (1) look over the border of the domain, (2) sort out terminology issues and (3) use reference data sets. It might seem that this is nothing more than simply stating the obvious. On the other hand, none of the approaches is the current practice in the field.