Reference values for the locomotive syndrome risk test quantifying mobility of 8681 adults aged 20–89 years: A cross-sectional nationwide study in Japan

Background The locomotive syndrome risk test was developed to quantify the decrease in mobility among adults, which could eventually lead to disability. The purpose of this study was to establish reference values for the locomotive syndrome risk test for adults and investigate the influence of age and sex. Methods We analyzed 8681 independent community dwellers (3607 men, 5074 women). Data pertaining to locomotive syndrome risk test (the two-step test, the stand-up test, and the 25-question geriatric locomotive function scale [GLFS-25]) scores were collected from seven administrative areas of Japan. Results The reference values of the three test scores were generated and all three test scores gradually decreased among young-to-middle-aged individuals and rapidly decreased in individuals aged over 60 years. The stand-up test score began decreasing significantly from the age of 30 years. The trajectories of decrease in the two-step test score with age was slightly different between men and women especially among the middle-aged individuals. The two physical test scores were more sensitive to aging than the self-reported test score. Conclusion The reference values generated in this study could be employed to determine whether an individual has mobility comparable to independent community dwellers of the same age and sex

PPG-Based Systolic Blood Pressure Estimation Method Using PLS and Level-Crossing Feature

This paper proposes a cuff-less systolic blood pressure (SBP) estimation method using partial least-squares (PLS) regression. Level-crossing features (LCFs) were used in this method, which were extracted from the contour lines arbitrarily drawn on the second-derivative photoplethysmography waveform. Unlike conventional height ratio features (HRFs), which are extracted on the basis of the peaks in the waveform, LCFs can be reliably extracted even if there are missing peaks in the waveform. However, the features extracted from adjacent contour lines show similar trends; thus, there is a strong correlation between the features, which leads to multicollinearity when conventional multiple regression analysis (MRA) is used. Hence, we developed a multivariate estimation method based on PLS regression to address this issue and estimate the SBP on the basis of the LCFs. Two-hundred-and-sixty-five subjects (95 males and 170 females [(Mean ± Standard Deviation) SBP: 133.1 ± 18.4 mmHg; age: 62.8 ± 16.8 years] participated in the experiments. Of the total number of subjects, 180 were considered as learning data, while 85 were considered as testing data. The values of the correlation coefficient between the measured and estimated values were found to be 0.78 for the proposed method (LCFs + PLS), 0.58 for comparison method 1 (HRFs + MRA), and 0.62 for comparison method 2 (HRFs + MRA). The proposed method was therefore found to demonstrate the highest accuracy among the three methods being compared