Back

Fall Injury Avoidance Strategy Scale (FIAS): Development and Validation of a Scale to Quantify Fall-Related Protective Movements

Chen, L.; Zanotto, T.; Lee, J. H.; Fang, J.; Tabatabaei, A.; Alexander, N.; Sosnoff, J. J.

2025-07-23 rehabilitation medicine and physical therapy
10.1101/2025.07.22.25331998 medRxiv
Show abstract

ObjectivesTo develop and validate the Fall Injury Avoidance Scale (FIAS), a novel video-screening tool to assess protective movements and injury risk during standing-height falls among older adults. DesignSecondary analysis of video-recorded experimental falls. SettingLaboratory setting. ParticipantTwenty-three older adults (aged 66-84 years; 4 males, 19 females) at risk of injurious falls. InterventionNot applicable. Main Outcome measuresParticipants experienced a total of six standardized experimentally-induced (backwards, left, and right directions). Fall movements were recorded using a motion capture system and commercially-available cameras. Hip and head peak acceleration were extracted from custom MatLab scripts. FIAS score (sum of 4 evidence-based protective fall movements, range 0-8) and the occurrence of head impact were determined by two independent raters using standardized and structured questionnaire. Inter-rater reliability, construct validity, responsiveness, and diagnostic utility of FIAS score were evaluated. ResultsA total of 274 experimental falls were analyzed. FIAS score indicated excellent inter-rater reliability (ICC(2,k) = 0.85 (95%CI [0.81-0.88], p<0.001). The higher FIAS scores were significantly associated with the lower hip peak acceleration (B=-1.01, 95%CI [-1.47, -0.56], p<0.001) and head peak acceleration (B=-6.08, 95%CI [-709, -5.06], p<0.001), and lower odds of head impact (Odds Ratio [OR]=0.20, 95%CI [0.12, 0.33], p<0.001). FIAS score also demonstrated significant responsiveness to the training-induced changes (F=18.74, p<0.001). Diagnostic analysis suggested that FIAS score [&ge;] 6 showed the high specificity (95.5%) for ruling out head impact falls. ConclusionsFIAS is a reliable, valid, and responsive tool to assess the protective fall movements and injury risk among older adults, which has potential utility in screening and prevention of fall-related injuries.

Published in Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (predicted rank #3) · training set

Matching journals

The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.