CORR Insights®: Are Accelerometer-based Functional Outcome Assessments Feasible and Valid After Treatment for Lower Extremity Sarcomas?

Abstract

Physicians often use performancebased clinical assessments like physical therapist evaluations or standardized scoring systems to assess function in our patients. Modern technology is impacting health care in many ways, but little is known about how we might use wearable technology to devise new clinical assessments of function for patients with sarcoma. Traditional functional outcome measures in sarcoma care include the Musculoskeletal Tumor Society Functional Assessment Score [3] and the Toronto Extremity Salvage Score [2]. Generally, gait has been studied in a laboratory using force plates that include costly equipment not easily used by the general public [1]. But recently, we have seen tremendous growth in personal wearable technology, including a number of devices that give users a somewhat-accurate assessment of the distance, time, places, and types of activities that we participate in. Other wearable devices canmeasure heart rate, the number of steps we take, and the number of stairs we climb. It seems reasonable, therefore, for clinicianscientists to explore the breadth of disease processes that can be analyzed with wearable technology [5, 7]. In the current study, Furtado and colleagues [4] bring wearable technology into the clinical realm of sarcoma care. To my knowledge, they are the first to report accelerometerbased body-worn monitor assessments of balance, gait, and timed upand-go tests to produce clinically useful data. Furtado and colleagues [4] demonstrate in a small subset of patients that wearable devices can be used to discriminate balance and gait differences between controls and limb salvage patients.