Deploying Mobile Monitoring for Aging Research: Conceptual and Methodological Perspectives

Enhancing healthy aging is a global challenge that faces many developed and developing countries. A key goal of healthy aging is to maintain older adults’ functional status, which can be measured by the characteristics of life-space activities of individuals. This presentation explains the development of a mobile monitoring system that can be used in clinical settings to measure and track the functional status of older adults. Specifically, a smartphone-server-PC architecture is developed and deployed to collect large flows of GPS and accelerometer data from individuals who volunteered to be a part of the IRB-approved research. An integrated methodological framework, including fuzzy classification and scale-adaptive clustering, is developed to address spatial uncertainties at different stages of GPS data processing. Evaluations of the framework based on data collected by smartphones suggest that the integrated method is effective and robust in capturing the characteristics of life-space activities of individuals. Research is in progress to apply this methodology in near-clinical and clinical settings.