Passive smartphone monitoring of people’s walking activity can be used to create population-level models of health and mortality risk. Researchers studied 100,000 participants in the UK Biobank national cohort who wore activity monitors with motion sensors for 1 week. The researchers think that their methods provide a viable pathway for nationwide health risk screening. The research, which found that smartphone sensors could accurately predict an individual’s 5-year risk of mortality, was recently published in the journal PLOS Digital Health. The team was able to successfully validate predictive models of mortality risk using only 6 minutes per day of steady walking collected by the sensor, combined with traditional demographic characteristics. Using the passively collected data, researchers were able to calculate the equivalent of gait speed. . . .
Read more at scitechdaily.com
