The way people walk says a lot about how healthy they are

Gait characteristics are sometimes regarded as the sixth vital sign in humans. They serve as a valuable indicator of a person's health, particularly in older adults - so why not measure them? A team of EPFL researchers is taking part in a major European project to design a device that can assess a person's gait more accurately. The way we walk is a direct indicator of our health. It can even give us an estimate of how many years we have left to live. These findings have been proven by several studies involving thousands of patients in the last two decades, and form the basis of an ambitious European project called MOBILISE-D. The project consortium consists of 34 partners from the academic, pharmaceutical and industrial fields, including EPFL. Researchers at EPFL's Laboratory of Movement Analysis and Measurement (LMAM) are working on a device that can measure people's gait during their everyday activities.