New technologies are increasingly being put at the service of health, in this case, with the aim of being able to assess a person's functional capacity and take measures to prevent or delay their decline.

Juan Diego Ruiz-Cárdenas, professor at the Universidad Católica de Murcia and member of the team called ''Grupo de ‘Ecografía en fisioterapia y terapia manual (ECOFISTEM)’' and Juan José Rodríguez-Juan, collaborating researcher, have already implemented this new application in the iOS app store and are currently in the process of making it available for Android devices. This work is being subsidised by the Séneca Foundation.

The tool will help health staff diagnose the physical condition of patients more accurately as well as more quickly and thus be able to recommend specific exercises for the prevention and preservation of health. As a result, and given its accessibility, it will help reduce costs in clinics in terms of detecting muscle ageing.

The way it works

The application analyses the gesture of getting up from a chair by recording video at 240 frames per second. After observing the movement and the time in which it was performed, it automatically and in real time calculates the muscle power used, taking into account that a decrease in muscle power has an impact on a person's level of dependence.