View clinical trials related to Fall Injury.
Filter by:The investigators aim to do this initial pilot study as an observational prospective cohort study, evaluating elderly patients who have capacity in National Health Service (NHS) rehabilitation and community hospitals. The patients will each be recorded doing simple activities of daily living in two 2 hour sessions using a discrete wireless device. This will generate anonymous data set that can be used to train and refine our machine learning algorithm.
Fall risk increases with age and the fear of falling can significantly impact activity, mobility and future fall risk. Exercise designed specifically to help balance is effective at improving balance and postural control for mobility, gait, and other daily activities. The individual purposes of this research are to (1) effectively use a prototype of an instrumented and actuated harness and support system, (2) demonstrate that this system can be used as designed during induced falls (reactive) and in place gaming (proactive) balance training protocols with the ability to modulate parameters as designed, measurements of harness system are accurate, and resultant output of the system matches intended parameters, and (3) demonstrate that the use of this system can allow provision of and study of varied balance training protocols, including: the measurements of the system, feedback of the system to participants, and the impact of the support parameters of the harness system on the task execution, learning and transfer. Two separate groups of 20 participants (40 total participants) will be studied. The first group will include 20 individuals between the ages of 18 to 40 years old with no history of falls or fear of falling. The first group will complete two sessions of harnessed video gaming balance training. The second group will include older adults over the age of 55 with self-reported falls or the fear of falling. The second group of older adults will complete two sessions of a reactive (slip) training protocol. For both groups, the first session participants will be randomly assigned to use either a standard fall-arrest harness or the new BWS harness system. At the second session, they will switch the harness used. The protocol will involve slips or gaming based balance training, initially of low intensity and then advanced by algorithm based on their response to the trial just prior. This will allow comparison of postural control, perturbation responses, motor learning, and confidence with the system between the two harness types.
Older patients (i.e.; ≥ 65 years) with a hip fracture, and who are admitted to orthopedics for surgery are particularly at risk of adverse health events such as delirium, recurrent falls and prolonged hospital stay caused by their frailty status. The Hospital Elder Life Program (HELP) is a comprehensive inpatient-care program that ensures optimal care for older adults in the hospital and, thus, might reduce the incidence of postoperative adverse health events. The overall objective of this study is to examine in a quantitative fashion the effects of the HELP program on adverse health events in geriatric inpatients admitted to the orthopedic ward at JGH for surgery after a hip fracture.
The purposes of this project to examine whether older adults can learn safe landing strategy during a fall. The research hypotheses are three-fold: 1) To determine whether older adults can learn a safe landing strategy to reduce impact severity of falling; 2) To examine whether the training effect on the right side falls can be transferred to the left side falls; and 3) To examine 1-week and 3-month retention effect of fall strategy training in older adults.
In the context of reduce staff for supervision of dependent elderly, automated risk alert systems could have a positive impact on the organization of night care by better targeting monitoring. Residents' sleep could be less affected with use of automatic alert system than by systematic monitoring visits. One study shows an improvement in the humor of residents after the use of such a system. The hypothesis of the study is that the use of a bed-raising detection system linked with the activation of a lighting environment and a caregivers alert system (Etolya-F® gerontechnology device, Anaxi Technology Company) would reduce intervention time in this population, thus limiting the time spent on floor and its physical and psychological consequences.
With aging, men and women develop a mild and progressive metabolic acidosis. This occurs as a result of declining renal function and ingestion of acid-producing diets. There is extensive evidence that severe metabolic acidosis causes bone and muscle loss, but the impact of the chronic, mild acidosis on bone and muscle in older individuals has not been established. In a recent study, administration of a single dose of bicarbonate daily for 3 months significantly reduced urinary excretion of N-telopeptide (NTX), a marker of bone resorption and urinary nitrogen, a marker of muscle wasting and improved muscle performance in the women but not the men. These and other data support a potential role for bicarbonate as a means of reducing the musculoskeletal declines that lead to extensive morbidity and mortality in the elderly. Before proceeding to a long-term bicarbonate intervention study, however, it is important to identify the dose of bicarbonate most likely to be optimal and to characterize the subjects who benefit most from it. This double blind, placebo controlled, dose-finding study will evaluate the effects of placebo and two doses of bicarbonate on urinary NTX and nitrogen excretion and on lower extremity performance over a 3 month period in 138 men and 138 women, age 60 and older. Changes in urinary excretion of NTX and nitrogen and in selected measures of lower extremity performance will be compared across the three groups. The safety and tolerability of the interventions will also be evaluated. This investigation should provide needed information on the appropriate dosing regimen for men and women and on the study population that should be enrolled in a future bicarbonate intervention trial to assess the long-term effects of this simple, low cost intervention on important clinical outcomes including rates of loss in bone and muscle mass, falls, and fractures.
An important challenge for the field of injury prevention and control is the translation of research findings into effective community-based prevention programs and practices. The National Center for Injury Prevention and Control believes that dissemination research can overcome this challenge by providing insight into the structures and methods needed to translate injury control research into everyday practice. The proposed dissemination research study will rigorously assess whether the use of a "facilitative system" can successfully bridge the gap between injury prevention and control research and the implementation of evidence-driven, community-based programs, policies, and practices. The facilitative system links communities with academic partners to provide communities with the skills and resources needed to help facilitate the community health improvement process. The system identifies what assets are available within communities, as well as the skills and resources needed to work through the community health improvement process. The facilitative system will then provide technical assistance, best practices guides, and direct consultation in carrying out all phases of the community health improvement process. This information is designed to increase community capacity in community assessment, coalition development, accessing and interpreting local injury prevention data, searching and selecting evidence-based research, and program planning and evaluation. The study will use a randomized community trial design to evaluate fall injury occurrence and process measures of program implementation in three groups of communities: - a control group receiving no special resources or guidance related to fall injury prevention or the community health improvement process; - a "Standard Program" group receiving modest funding to implement an "evidence-based" fall prevention program in their local community; - a "Facilitative System" group receiving facilitative system support in addition to the resources provided the Standard Program group. We hypothesize that the Facilitative System program will be more effective at: - reducing fall-related injuries in the elderly; - building community coalitions that are goal-oriented and sustainable; - implementing community-based, evidence-driven fall prevention programs that are both tailored to the community needs and yet faithful to empirically-tested fall prevention research studies