Abstract
Falls are a multifactorial cause of injuries for older people. Subjects with osteoporosis are more vulnerable to falls. The focus of this study is to investigate the performance of the different machine learning models built on spatiotemporal gait parameters to predict falls particularly in subjects with osteoporosis. Spatiotemporal gait parameters and prospective registration of falls were obtained from a sample of 110 community dwelling older women with osteoporosis (age 74.3 ± 6.3) and 143 without osteoporosis (age 68.7 ± 6.8). We built four different models, Support Vector Machines, Neuronal Networks, Decision Trees, and Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBN), for each specific set of parameters used, and compared them considering their accuracy, precision, recall and F-score to predict fall risk. The F-score value shows that DBN based models are more efficient to predict fall risk, and the best result obtained is when we use a DBN model using the experts’ variables with FSMC’s variables, mixed variables set, obtaining an accuracy of 80%, and recall of 73%. The results confirm the feasibility of computational methods to complement experts’ knowledge to predict risk of falling within a period of time as high as 12 months.