Preventing falls for older adults

According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are roughly 36 million older adults who suffer serious injuries from falling each year. Out of those falls, 32,000 people die from their injuries.

As the baby boomer generation continues to grow older, those numbers are expected to rise. But falls can be prevented, and ASU biomedical engineering professor Thurmon Lockhart joined us to provide fall prevention techniques.

The reasons behind the increase in falls can evolve from various sensory reasons, from eyesight and hearing loss to muscular skeletal loss.

“In general, we can look at their gait and posture, posture stability, and then tell what kind of issues that this person has in terms of fall proneness, and as a result of that, what kind of intervention can we bring towards to help this individual,” said Lockhart.