King's College London

We have developed, and are validating in healthy volunteers, an instrumented motion sensor squeeze ball. The ball contains force and pressure sensors, an accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer to collect data on grip strength, standing balance and overhead reach. This will inform understanding of ability to perform activities of daily living in the home. We now need to determine feasibility and acceptability of the ball in the home with healthy volunteers and then with intensive care survivors.

This project is part of the 'Communities' and 'Frugal Innovations' clusters within King’s Better Health & Care Futures.

We will recruit 30 participants and provide a ball and movement tasks to do in the home over a period of eight weeks. We will use a questionnaire and interview) to explore if these participants find the ball acceptability and if the ball is feasible in terms of generating analysable movement biomarker data.

Together, the data from this preliminary work will help to de-risk our planned applications to other funding streams using the instrumented ball as a data collection method. This will help us collect real world comprehensive data over time to better understand recovery in intensive care survivors.

Mixed methods study.

Our work will inform better understanding of ICU survivor physical recovery.