Machine Learning Approaches for the Frailty Screening: A Narrative Review

Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022 Jul 20;19(14):8825. doi: 10.3390/ijerph19148825.

Abstract

Frailty characterizes a state of impairments that increases the risk of adverse health outcomes such as physical limitation, lower quality of life, and premature death. Frailty prevention, early screening, and management of potential existing conditions are essential and impact the elderly population positively and on society. Advanced machine learning (ML) processing methods are one of healthcare's fastest developing scientific and technical areas. Although research studies are being conducted in a controlled environment, their translation into the real world (clinical setting, which is often dynamic) is challenging. This paper presents a narrative review of the procedures for the frailty screening applied to the innovative tools, focusing on indicators and ML approaches. It results in six selected studies. Support vector machine was the most often used ML method. These methods apparently can identify several risk factors to predict pre-frail or frailty. Even so, there are some limitations (e.g., quality data), but they have enormous potential to detect frailty early.

Keywords: artificial intelligence; frailty; healthcare; indicators; screening.

Publication types

  • Review
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Aged
  • Frail Elderly
  • Frailty* / diagnosis
  • Frailty* / epidemiology
  • Geriatric Assessment / methods
  • Humans
  • Machine Learning
  • Mass Screening
  • Quality of Life

Grants and funding

This research was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) under Frail.Care.AI project (DSAIPA/AI/0106/2019) and CardioFollow.AI project (DSAIPA/AI/0094/2020).