Project Overview

Identifying seniors at particular risk for falling requires an expert clinical assessment. However, clinicians with this expertise are scarce and, for seniors in rural settings, travelling to an urban clinic for assessment is impractical and costly. Virtual care can help solve this access barrier, but videoconferencing is inadequate for a falling risk assessment and the current falls risk assessment tools are limited in their ability to identify the root cause of these vulnerabilities and guide treatments to reduce falling risk. Novel approaches for the delivery of virtual care are needed to ensure that equitable access to care is addressed while ensuring that the quality of the assessment and outcomes are not compromised. Our team has developed ProMote, a virtual care platform incorporating a telepresence robot to support authentic interaction between the patient and clinician, as well as a markerless motion capture system for data collection. The overall goal of this project is to reduce the risk of falls for seniors in supported living environments through exercise programs targeted at their specific vulnerabilities related to their coordinative abilities (i.e. balance, coordination, movement patterns).