University of Arizona researchers develop AI device to detect frailty in older adults

Researchers at the University of Arizona have developed a wearable device to help care for older adults and better diagnose frailty.

Biomedical engineering professor Philipp Gutruf says the device is designed to address frailty, which can lead to falls and hospitalization.

The device is a mesh sleeve that can be worn on the leg and record motion. It incorporates AI, which reduces the need for large data transfers and frequent charging.

“So we have tested this technology on more than 20 people. So the devices, you can think about them as like a mesh that you wear over our sleeve, that you wear on your arm or your leg — in this particular case, the leg,” he said.

Gutruf says commercializing the device still requires further steps.

“In order to get this to the market, we need to still run a larger study with trying to gather resources at the moment to do that, where you involve, you know, hundreds of patients to test the efficacy and safety of the device on a large scale,” he said.

Gutruf says the goal is to make diagnosis more efficient.

The team’s study is published in the Nature Communications journal.