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game showed to improve hip muscle strength and balance control in older adults after
completing an 8-weeks intervention.
From a clinical perspective, the capabilities of the Kinect have also the potential to
implement low-cost methods to assess fall risk in older adults. This is achieved
through the collection of measurement that fulfill the requirements of certain clinical
tests such as posture control [9], gait [10], dual tasking ability [11], and mobility [12],
among others. Overall, these methods rely on the Kinect to obtain information of the
human body positions in real-time, which are shown to be fairly accurate. For
instance in the work done by Dutta et al [13], the Kinect demonstrated the ability to
validly assess kinematic strategies of postural control. This suggests that the Kinect
could be considered an effective tool when it comes to collection position-based
measurements. However, for time-based measurements the Kinect introduces an
additional challenge as it is a camera-based device restricted to process up to 30
skeleton frames per second.
The work presented in this paper focuses on evaluating the capabilities of the
Kinect to reliably collect timing variables to fulfill the requirements of the Choice
Stepping Reaction Time (CSRT) task, a time-based clinical test that has shown to
reliably predict falls in order adults [14]. This study hence evaluates the validity of a
Kinect-based system developed by the authors with a validated choice reaction time
device. The latter has shown to effectively discriminate between groups of recurrent
fallers and non-fallers [15]. The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2
presents brief summary of related work in the field of fall risk assessment and
describes the Choice Stepping Reaction time. Section 3 sets out the methodology used
for this evaluation. Results and Discussion can be found in Section 4 and 5. Finally,
conclusions and future work are presented in Section 5.
2
Related Work
The Choice Stepping Reaction Time (CSRT) task is a composite measure of
sensorimotor functions, such as balance and strength, and cognitive functions such as
attention and central processing speed [14]. The test is able to combine several
dimensions of fall risk based on these composite metrics. For the CSRT Task, the
person stands on the two central step panels of a wooden board (see Figure 1). One of
four surrounding panels (front left
or LF
, front right
or RF
, left
or LL
, right
or RR
)
illuminates randomly and the person is required to step on this panel as quickly as
possible and then return to the center. The sequence is presented randomly as well as
the time between trials so that the user is unable to anticipate the time and location of
the next stimulus. The mean reaction time of 20 trials is then measured and analyzed
for clinical diagnosis.
In the work done by Schone et al. [15], a Dance Mat Choice Step Reaction Time
device was introduced and validated against the original CSRT Test. In this system,
the CSRT Test is achieved through the use of a custom-made dance mat (or MAT)
that contains 12 step panels. The mechanics of the test are the same as the original
