Motion sensors may potentially be used to help gauge the risk of their owners’ mortality, if a new study published this week in PLOS Digital Health is to be believed.
In their study, a team of researchers used the data from 100,000 participants of the UK Biobank who wore activity monitors with motion sensors for 1 week, regarding this group as “demographically representative of the UK population”.
The team attempted to simulate smartphone monitoring and come up with a model that would help estimate mortality risk based on a person’s acceleration and distance travelled during a six-minute period.
Study author Bruce Schatz from the University of Illinois, cited by The Daily Beast, explained that the researchers chose that particular duration to mimic the so-called Six Minute Walking Test that, as its name implies, measures the distance a person can walk over six minutes on hard flat surface.
Not only that test is “a very good external measure of what's going on internally,” Schatz said, it can also be replicated via the use of a wrist sensor or a cheap phone.
“I know for a fact that these kinds of models will work with cheap phones,” he remarked.
The model Schatz’s team has come up with resulted in 72 percent accuracy of predictions of future death after one year, and 73 percent after five years, the media outlet notes.