Frailty Assessment Using Temporal Gait Characteristics and a Long Short-Term Memory Network

Faced with the rapidly aging world population, frailty has emerged as a major health burden among the elderly. This study aimed to investigate the feasibility of using temporal gait characteristics and a long short-term memory network for assessing frailty. Seventy-four community-dwelling elderly individuals participated in this study. The participants were categorized into three groups by their FRAIL scale: robust, pre-frail, and frail groups. The participants completed a 7-meter walking at the self-selected pace with a gyroscope on each foot. Analyzing the gyroscopic data produced seven temporal gait parameters per each gait cycle. Enumerating six consecutive values of each gait parameter produced the gait sequence features which were used as frailty predictors along with the demographic features. Five-fold cross-validation was applied to 70% of the data, and the remaining 30% were used as test data. An F-1-score of 0.931 was achieved in classifying the robust, pre-frail, and frail groups by the random forest model trained with age, sex, and the outputs of the long short-term memory network-based classifier that used the initial and terminal double-limb support, step, and stride times as inputs. The proposed approach of assessing frailty using the arrhythmic gait pattern of the elderly and machine learning technique is novel and promising. Pioneering a way that self-monitor frailty at home without any help from experts, the study can contribute toearly diagnosis of frailty and make timely medical intervention possible.