Hearing Aid Accelerometer Based Pedometry Assessment for Older Adults

The assessment of activity for older adults provides important knowledge about their well-being as declines could be caused by health issues. Reduced activity can lead to poorer health, social isolation, loneliness, and cognitive decline. Many aging adults require hearing aids (HA) and these devices now include accelerometers that could be used as pedometers. In this work, the performance of the hearing aid manufacturer provided pedometer measurements is compared to pedometry from an Actigraph accelerometer while both are used by healthy older adults for 14 days. The results show that the research subjects wore the hearing aids for 10 to 14 hours per day on average providing good compliance. When left and right hearing aids are compared with each other, the pedometer results are consistent. The correlation of the hearing aids to the Actigraph was very high, but the actual step counts recorded varied above and below the Actigraph results showing that the provided hearing aid algorithm provides an indication of activity, but additional improvements should be considered to improve algorithm accuracy.