The study of frailty assessment and health improvement for elder

• Main Authors: Yu Chuan Chang, 張育銓
• Other Authors: C. C. Lin
• Format: Others
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/84347215980551045248

碩士 === 長庚大學 === 資訊工程學系 === 99 === Frailty is one of the greatest gerontological challenges faced by modern societies with ageing populations. Compared with their age-matched non-frail counterparts, frail elderly people have a much higher risk of falling related injuries, which could result in disability, hospitalization, institutionalization or even death. Frailty increases the risk of adverse health outcomes, including mortality, institutionalization, falls and hospitalization. In the United States and Europe, approximately 10-25% of the elderly population over the age of 65 and almost 50% of population over the age of 85 meet the definition of frailty [10]. Frailty is one of the greatest gerontological challenges faced by societies with ageing populations in the next 10 years. Our vision is to build an elder's fitness center to delay the degradation. The study can be summarized as four major objectives: (1) Establish the standard of frailty indicators and derive the exercise prescription algorithm based on the relationship between the frailty indicators and exercise. (2) Develop the information system of elder’s fitness center and design interesting multimedia interactive games to detect the frailty indicators automatically. (3) Develop four in one frailty detection chair, and modified of existing fitness equipment. (4) Planning elder’s fitness center service model. We designed two experiments to test the overall measurement instruments performance and survey the degree of user satisfaction: (1) Pearson’s correlation analysis comparing traditional instruments and electronic instruments. There were 20 subjects in this experiment and we used Pearson’s correlation analysis to interpret the data. The results shown most correlation coefficients for the frailty indicator measurements are highly positive, indicating strong correlations between our system and traditional measurement methods. (2) Elder’s fitness center satisfaction survey experiment. The 20 cases of previous experiment also involved in the satisfaction survey. All the questions of satisfaction survey obtain more than 5 points in 7 points question. The results shown the subjects have a high degree of satisfaction and the subjects can accept the innovative concept of elder's fitness center.