The role of emerging information technologies in frailty assessment

Frailty has an insidious impact on multiple systems, resulting in increased disability, morbidity, and mortality among community-dwelling older adults. Notwithstanding the burden that frailty imposes on individuals, there is still a lack of consensus on its operational and conceptual definitions, leading research groups to invest efforts into developing a more comprehensive model of frailty. A number of screening models have been proposed to objectively measure the magnitude of the frailty process and to assess its long-term consequences. Each model incorporates a distinct set of physiological parameters stemming from the combination of a number of clinical domains. Emerging information technologies (ITs) could provide an effective, flexible, and integrative solution for monitoring and measuring the different aspects of the frailty construct in real-life settings. The purpose of this article is to discuss how various ITs can be used to measure the core characteristics of frailty identified from an integrative systematic review. We discuss the actual and potential integration of ITs in frailty research, strengths and limitations of various methods, and areas for future work.