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The number of older adults is increasing worldwide, and it is expected that by 2050 over 2 billion individuals will be more than 60 years old. Older adults are exposed to numerous pathological problems such as Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, post-stroke, and orthopedic disturbances. Several physiotherapy methods that involve measurement of movements, such as the Timed-Up and Go test, can be done to support efficient and effective evaluation of pathological symptoms and promotion of health and well-being. In this systematic review, the authors aim to determine how the inertial sensors embedded in mobile devices are employed for the measurement of the different parameters involved in the Timed-Up and Go test. The main contribution of this paper consists of the identification of the different studies that utilize the sensors available in mobile devices for the measurement of the results of the Timed-Up and Go test. The results show that mobile devices embedded motion sensors can be used for these types of studies and the most commonly used sensors are the magnetometer, accelerometer, and gyroscope available in off-the-shelf smartphones. The features analyzed in this paper are categorized as quantitative, quantitative + statistic, dynamic balance, gait properties, state transitions, and raw statistics. These features utilize the accelerometer and gyroscope sensors and facilitate recognition of daily activities, accidents such as falling, some diseases, as well as the measurement of the subject's performance during the test execution.

Inertial sensors are commonly embedded in several devices, including smartphones, and other specific devices. This type of sensors may be used for different purposes, including the recognition of different diseases. Several studies are focused on the use of accelerometer for the automatic recognition of different diseases, and it may powerful the different treatments with the use of less invasive and painful techniques for patients. This paper is focused in the systematic review of the studies available in the literature for the automatic recognition of different diseases with accelerometer sensors. The disease that is the most reliably detectable disease using accelerometer sensors, available in 54% of the analyzed studies, is the Parkinson’s disease. The machine learning methods implements for the recognition of Parkinson’s disease reported an accuracy of 94%. Other diseases are recognized in less number that will be subject of further analysis in the future.

The Timed-Up and Go test is a very used test in the physiotherapy area. For the measurement of the results of the test, we propose to use a smartphone with several embedded sensors, including accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope, a Bitalino device with the Electromyography (EMG) and Electrocardiography (ECG) sensors, and a second Bitalino device with a pressure sensor connected and positioned in the back of the chair. This architecture allows to capture several types of data from the sensors easily. In this paper, we present a structured method to implement the measurement of the different parameters involved in the Timed-up and Go test, for acquiring, processing and cleaning the collected measurements. This data will help in the classification of the test results initially, and later on to discover more complex patterns and related conditions, such as equilibrium changes, neurological pathologies, degenerative pathologies, lesions of lower limbs and chronic venous diseases.