This article reviews the use of wearable sensors for the monitoring of physical activity (PA)for different purposes, including assessment of gait and balance, prevention and/or detection of falls,recognition of various PAs, conduction and assessment of rehabilitation exercises and monitoringof neurological disease progression. The article provides in-depth information on the retrievedarticles and discusses study shortcomings related to demographic factors, i.e., age, gender, healthyparticipants vs patients, and study conditions. It is well known that motion patterns change with ageand the onset of illnesses, and that the risk of falling increases with age. Yet, studies including olderpersons are rare. Gender distribution was not even provided in several studies, and others includedonly, or a majority of, men. Another shortcoming is that none of the studies were conducted inreal-life conditions. Hence, there is still important work to be done in order to increase the usefulnessof wearable sensors in these areas. The article highlights flaws in how studies based on previouslycollected datasets report on study samples and the data collected, which makes the validity andgeneralizability of those studies low. Exceptions exist, such as the promising recently reported opendataset FallAllD, wherein a longitudinal study with older adults is ongoing.
This research was conducted within the scope of the scope of the ESS-H+ (Embedded Sensor Systems for Health Plus). The project is funded by the Swedish Knowledge Foundation (project number: 20180158).