Speakers

Eddie Mitchell

Joe Gibbs Human Performance Institute

Silvia Del Din

Newcastle University

Every step counts: a journey toward validating digital mobility outcomes in the real world

Have you ever thought about how you walk? Mobility—and specifically gait—is recognised as the “sixth vital sign,” offering a sensitive biomarker of overall health and brain function. Changes in mobility can signal early risk, support diagnosis, and track disease progression across numerous conditions, including Parkinson’s disease. Traditionally, quantitative gait analysis has been confined to specialised laboratory environments, capturing only brief snapshots of walking performance.  Yet assessing mobility in the home and community—the “real world”—provides a far richer and more ecologically valid picture of how people truly move through daily life.

Digital health technologies, such as wearable devices including inertial measurement units, now enable continuous, objective monitoring of real-world mobility.  These devices can quantify walking behaviour, capture clinically relevant digital mobility outcomes (e.g., step count, gait speed), and support remote assessment at scale.  However, reliable use of these measures requires rigorous technical validation and robust data standards.

This talk will outline why monitoring mobility in daily life matters and how high-quality digital outcomes can be generated.  Key findings from the Mobilise-D Technical Validation Study will be presented. This includes the development and validation of a framework for algorithm validation, benchmarking algorithms performance across diverse conditions, and establishing transparent, reproducible pipelines to ensure accuracy in real-world environments.  The work on data harmonisation and standardisation will be discussed—critical steps for comparability across devices, studies, and clinical applications. Throughout the talk, applications from Parkinson’s disease research will highlight both the potential and the challenges of using validated digital mobility outcomes to transform clinical trials and personalised care.