Evaluation of Fall Risk for Post-Stroke Patients Using Bluetooth Low-Energy Wireless Sensor

The widespread need to assess fall risk has generated need for a reliable, inexpensive, and quantifiable clinical measure. In this paper, we propose mStroke, a practical, accurate, and mobile health system that remotely measures fall risk estimation for post stroke patients. Our proposed system is delivered as an application (App) running on our hardware system consisting of two bluetooth low energy (BLE) modular sensor devices and a smartphone. This system uses accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer to measure fall risk within the functional reach test, an accurate single-tasked clinical tool for fall risk assessment. The proposed system has been extensively tested using emulated and real data from Physical Therapy students as well as stroke patients.