Grant: Emerging Team Grant: Alliances in Mobility in Aging (Launch 2)

Research on mobility has been mostly confined to the laboratory, providing fairly good insight about intrinsic obstacle brought about aging or disease. However, the challenges facing the aging population at home and in the community, i.e., extrinsic obstacles brought about the environment in which they navigate have been largely unexplored. Furthermore, the relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic obstacles has been rarely examined, probably due to a lack of proper technology to examine these issues. To understand the changes in mobility that occurs with normal aging, or with disease of the central nervous system such as Parkinson's disease, we must quantify, characterize and model movements in the natural environment, e.g., in and around the home. Here, we will record whole-body 3D movement during extended periods of time (hours) with a newly-developed highly portable, light-weight camera-free system that can provide 3D body rendering in the home. Community mobility will be explored using a GPS-based system that allows us to examine the sphere of mobility, and how it is influence by age or disease. We will develop the mathematical means to assess the quantity of movement, characterize and model that movement, identify key features of mobility to improve quantitative assessment of movement, and finally correlate our results with those obtained by clinical scales of mobility. Based on this new understanding of the effect of age and disease on home and community mobility, we will propose improvements to current clinical scales so that they better reflect the mobility at home and in the community. We will also and clinically-friendly technological tools to assess that mobility. One ultimate goal is to better identify barriers to mobility within a person's home and find characteristics to predict "adverse events" (e.g., falls) that may jeopardize the health of elderly individuals or persons suffering from neurological ailments.