Walking speed could be tell tale sign of health problems

How fast you walk could tell you more about your health than your GP.

A growing body of research has suggested your gait may be a better predictor of health issues like cognitive decline, falls and even certain cardiac or pulmonary diseases.

While it’s hard to accurately monitor walking speed continuously and without obstruction, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Laboratory (CSAIL) has been working on it.

Professor Dina Katabi’s group created WiGait which can measure the walking speed of numerous people with up to 99 per cent accuracy.

WiGait is about the size of a small painting and can sit on any house wall while determining the length of a person’s stride.

It shows a person as a dot on a screen, ensuring privacy while maintaining accuracy.

Emitting roughly one-hundredth the amount of radiation of a standard mobile phone, WiGait is modelled after Katabi’s prior work, a system called WiTrack.

WiTrack analysed wireless signals reflected off people to measure a range of behaviours including breathing, falling and even specific emotions.

Lead author of the WiGait presentation paper, PhD student Chen-Yu Hsu, said in-home sensors would allow researchers to measure trends in how walking speed changes over longer periods of time.

“This can provide insight into whether someone should adjust their health regimen; whether that’s doing physical therapy or altering their medications,” Hsu said.

The CSAIL team believes WiGait could allow researchers to better understand conditions like Parkinson’s disease, which is characterised by reduced size step.

Katabi and her team said the device could reveal a trove of vital health information, particularly for the mature aged, as a change in walking speed could signal that a person is injured or at risk for falling.

“Many avoidable hospitalisations are related to issues like congestive heart disease, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which have all been shown to be correlated to gait speed,” Katabi said.

“Reducing the number of hospitalisations, even by a small amount, could vastly improve health care costs.”

While walking speed is typically measured by physical therapists or a GP using a stopwatch, WiGait measures walking speed with a high level of detail by analysing the surrounding wireless signals and reflections off a person’s body.

Wearable technology like FitBit only offers a rough estimate speed based on step count, while GPS-enabled smartphones are comparably inaccurate.

The CSAIL team also created WiGait with the ability to differentiate walking from other movements, like mopping the floor or cleaning your teeth.

Would you use WiGait in your home if it meant preventing hospitalisation?