Floor Plan-Agnostic Detection of Gait Speed Drifts Using Ambient Sensors

Abstract

Gait speed is a vital health indicator for older adults, as changes in gait speed can reflect physiological and functional decline. Ambient sensors offer a promising, privacy-preserving solution for continuous in-home monitoring of gait speed; although it is often limited by methods requiring a home floor plan, which is frequently unfeasible. This paper proposes a novel, floor plan-agnostic method to detect gait speed drifts using only sparse ambient sensors. Our approach identifies informative sensor-to-sensor transitions and analyses fluctuations in their duration. For each sequence a non-parametric statistical test detects changes between a recent period and an initial baseline; and daily test results are aggregated to provide a robust drift detection response. We evaluate our method on a simulated dataset across four different home layouts, showing performance comparable to, and in some cases exceeding, a state-of-the-art baseline that requires floor plan information. This work demonstrates a feasible approach for scalable, cost effective gait drift detection monitoring, providing a foundation for future validation in complex real-world environments.