IFRA: A Machine Learning-Based Instrumented Fall Risk Assessment Scale Derived from an Instrumented Timed Up and Go Test in Stroke Patients

TL;DR

This study introduces IFRA, a machine learning-based tool that improves fall risk assessment in stroke patients by analyzing movement data from an instrumented test.

Contribution

IFRA is a novel machine learning-derived fall risk scale that outperforms traditional clinical tools in identifying high-risk stroke patients.

Findings

Vertical and medio-lateral acceleration and angular velocity were key predictors of fall risk.

IFRA assigned more than half of actual fallers to the high-risk category, outperforming traditional scales.

IFRA showed statistically significant association with fall status (p = 0.004).

Abstract

Background/Objectives: Falls represent a major health concern for stroke survivors, necessitating effective risk assessment tools. This study proposes the Instrumented Fall Risk Assessment (IFRA) scale, a novel screening tool derived from Instrumented Timed Up and Go (ITUG) test data, designed to capture mobility measures often missed by traditional scales. Methods: We employed a two-step machine learning approach to develop the IFRA scale: first, identifying predictive mobility features from ITUG data and, second, creating a stratification strategy to classify patients into low-, medium-, or high-fall-risk categories. This study included 142 participants, who were divided into training (including synthetic cases), validation, and testing sets (comprising 22 non-fallers and 10 fallers). IFRA’s performance was compared against traditional clinical scales (e.g., standard TUG and Mini-BESTest) using Fisher’s Exact test. Results: Machine learning analysis identified specific features as key predictors, namely vertical and medio-lateral acceleration, and angular velocity during walking and sit-to-walk transitions. IFRA demonstrated a statistically significant association with fall status (Fisher’s Exact test p = 0.004) and was the only scale to assign more than half of the actual fallers to the high-risk category, outperforming the comparative clinical scales in this dataset. Conclusions: This proof-of-concept study demonstrates IFRA’s potential as an automated, complementary approach for fall risk stratification in post-stroke patients. While IFRA shows promising discriminative capability, particularly for identifying high-risk individuals, these preliminary findings require validation in larger cohorts before clinical implementation.

Figures