“Touchscreen assessment tool” (TATOO), an assessment tool based on the expanded conceptual model of frailty

Abstract

Frailty is a common clinical syndrome in older adults; it carries an increased risk of negative health events and outcomes including falls, incident disability, hospitalization, and mortality. Therefore, it is critical to identify high-risk subsets of the elderly population and explore new arenas for frailty prevention and treatment. This chapter will provide an overview of the current state of assessment models for frailty syndrome in the elderly and will describe a new assessment tool based on mobile technology, which takes account and advantage of the ways in which elderly people interact with a touchscreen. While healthcare providers and researchers in the field of aging have long been aware of the changing characteristics and needs of older people living in the community, there has not been any marked change in frailty syndrome assessment models until now. In the twenty-first century world with its technological advancements, the elderly require new, special physical skills combining perceptual, motor, and cognitive abilities for their functional daily activities and for maintaining their independence and quality of life. We believe a conceptual model of frailty can be expanded to incorporate new aspects related to the usage of technology by the elderly, better covering the complexity and multidimensionality of modern life. In addition, in our vision, that the expanded conceptual model can be operationalized and translated into an assessment tool. In the last part of this chapter, we will present the “Touchscreen Assessment Tool” (TATOO), an assessment tool based on this expanded conceptual model. This novel tool assesses elderly people’s frailty and functioning using a touchscreen, a representative technology required for several activities involved in daily functioning in the modern world. Most importantly, we present the TATOO prototype, which we plan to develop in the future as a continuous monitoring instrument for activities performed in daily life, combined with advanced sensor-based measuring and big data analytics algorithms.