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Continuous Assessment of Daily-Living Gait Using Self-Supervised Learning of Wrist-Worn Accelerometer Data

Brand, Y. E.; Buchman, A. S.; Kluge, F.; Palmerini, L.; Becker, C.; Cereatti, A.; Maetzler, W.; Vereijken, B.; Yarnall, A. J.; Rochester, L.; Del Din, S.; Mueller, A.; Hausdorff, J. M.; Perlman, O.

2025-05-21 public and global health
10.1101/2025.05.21.25328061 medRxiv
Show abstract

Physical activity and mobility are critical for healthy aging and predict diverse health outcomes. While wrist-worn accelerometers are widely used to monitor physical activity, estimating gait metrics from wrist data remains challenging. We extend ElderNet, a self-supervised deep-learning model previously validated for walking-bout detection, to estimate gait metrics from wrist accelerometry. Validation involved 819 older adults (Rush-Memory- and-Aging-Project) and 85 individuals with gait impairments (Mobilise-D), from six medical centers. In Mobilise-D, ElderNet achieved an absolute error of 8.82 cm/s and an intra-class correlation of 0.87 for gait speed, outperforming state-of-the-art methods (p < 0.001) and models using a lower-back sensor. ElderNet outperformed (percentage error; p < 0.01) competing approaches in estimating cadence and stride length, and better (p < 0.01) classified mobility disability (AUC = 0.80) than conventional gait or physical activity metrics. These results render ElderNet a scalable tool for gait assessment using wrist-worn devices in aging and clinical populations.

Published in npj Digital Medicine (predicted rank #1) · training set

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