Just enough measurement: a proposed paradigm for designing medical instrumentation

Our research group hypothesizes that one way to provide low-cost healthcare delivery efficiently is through the use of a large number of inexpensive sensors that can provide meaningful medical data. Typical development of medical instrumentation pursues increased resolution and higher accuracy - accompanied by a corresponding increase in cost; it is no secret that high costs impose a heavy burden on healthcare. We seek to invert the adage that quality is more important than quantity by extracting high quality biomedical information from a large quantity of low-cost measurements, and to demonstrate this using measurement instrumentation developed in our lab for extra-clinical assessment and rehabilitation tools. This will be discussed in terms of our initial experiments in evaluating balance and postural stability. This is an area of critical clinical importance: 2.6 million non-fatal fall injuries in persons over age 65 resulted in direct health care costs of $19 billion (in 2000) in the U.S., and the number of persons over age 65 in the U.S. is projected to more than double between 2000 and 2030.