Grant: Alliance Grants

The Smart Hallway project was initiated to solve an ongoing issue in clinical and elderly-care facilities, namely the need to measure how people move where time, facility, and human resources barriers prevent daily movement analysis. Institutional hallways are often used for visual evaluation of patients or to perform walking tests. Ideally, movement measurement and assessment can occur in hallways near patient care areas as part of daily clinical practice, use unobtrusive equipment, not require patient preparation that takes time and may influence movement, have automated analysis, and provide immediate outcome reporting to the clinician. This project will develop software for assessing features related to a patient's clinical status. Markerless and contactless technologies will automatically digitize the person's movements as they walk through an institutional hallway. With an improved multi-camera approach, we will generate 3D data, perform movement calculations, and generate a report, all with minimal or no human intervention (i.e., the system is not a drain on staff time and does not require specialized staff). This information then becomes the gateway for Artificial Intelligence (AI) models to enhance knowledge extracted from this data; for example, providing indicators for fall risk, dementia progression, prosthesis alignment issues, etc. The new research on mobility assessment AI models was previously near-impossible to create and apply since the input human movement data could not be collected due to human resource and motion-lab-space requirements. This engineering research will enhance our understanding of how to best apply AI-models for movement related applications and provide better understanding of which data features are most relevant to clinically required outcomes. Successful research will enable a new range of outcome measurement opportunities in health and eldercare that are of global importance and could improve clinical decision-making for Canadians. A validated Smart Hallway system will revolutionize how quantitative movement assessment is integrated into regular healthcare workflows.