RESEARCH ARTICLE Fall Risk Assessment Tools for Elderly Living in the Community: Can We Do Better?

Background Falls are a common, serious threat to the health and self-confidence of the elderly. Assess-ment of fall risk is an important aspect of effective fall prevention programs. Objectives and methods In order to test whether it is possible to outperform current prognostic tools for falls, we ana-lyzed 1010 variables pertaining to mobility collected from 976 elderly subjects (InCHIANTI study). We trained and validated a data-driven model that issues probabilistic predictions about future falls. We benchmarked the model against other fall risk indicators: history of falls, gait speed, Short Physical Performance Battery (Guralnik et al. 1994), and the litera-ture-based fall risk assessment tool FRAT-up (Cattelani et al. 2015). Parsimony in the num-ber of variables included in a tool is often considered a proxy for ease of administration. We studied how constraints on the number of variables affect predictive accuracy. Results The proposed model and FRAT-up both attained the same discriminative ability; the are