Are Wearable Sensors Useful to Assess the Psychophysical Fatigue Due to Physical Activity in Elderly People with Mild Cognitive Impairment? A Preliminary Study

Nowadays, wearable biomedical sensors provide a challenging opportunity to measure physiological parameters in an unobtrusive manner; therefore, they can be applied in nearly any scenarios with protocols adapted to the end-user evaluated. Furthermore, the opportunities offered by the new development in the field of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) allow such devices to be checked in real-time by means of a smartphone or tablet, further enhancing their usefulness. Recently, a growing interest in wearables was seen for their application in monitoring the health status of elderly people, which might benefit from a continuous control of their parameters without continuously getting to the General Practitioner (GP). As such, wearables are also used within scientific research for studying the physiological reactions to particular stimuli. Here, we evaluated the variation in electrocardiogram (ECG) parameters in a cohort of 44 subjects with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), a pre-clinical condition often leading to dementia in a relatively short amount of time. Such parameters, often referred to the activation of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS), were checked before, during and after a session of light physical activity in two different phases: i) at T0, and ii) after a 7-month treatment consisting of regular sessions of cognitive and physical training and advices about correct lifestyle (T1). Satisfaction questionnaires, as well as data from wearables were acquired and discussed, reporting an optimal usability for the devices by theMCI population and an effect, both at T0 and T1, for the physical activity on the autonomic parameters.