71 Discriminative Ability of a Falls Screening Mobile Application in Identifying Fallers among Community Dwelling Older Adults: Preliminary Results

Early falls screening among community dwelling older adults is important as a part of falls prevention strategy. Falls Screening Mobile Application (FallSA) was demonstrated to be accepted, reliable and valid to be used for self-risk assessment among community dwelling older adults in an earlier study. However, its discriminative ability is unknown. We aimed to examine the discriminative ability of FallSA in classifying fallers and non-fallers among community dwelling older adults. Methodology A total of 182 community dwelling older adults with mean age of 71.42 ± 5.1 participated in this cross sectional study. Participants demographic and falls history data were obtained. Participants with one or more falls were categorized as fallers. FallSA was used to identify participants falls risk. Independent t-test was used to compare falls risk score among fallers and non-fallers for its discriminative ability. Results Approximately 20% participants were categorized as fallers. Majority of the fallers were females (66.7%), had lower physical activity level and higher scores of geriatric depression scales compared to non-fallers. There was a significant (p< 0.01) different in the FallSA score between fallers (7.33±1.77) and non-fallers (4.34±1.72). Conclusion Our study results showed that FallSA could be used to discriminate fallers and non-fallers in community dwelling older adults. Further studies are in progress to determine the predictive validity of FallSA.