Ambient Gait Assessment with Teton

The way we walk reveals a great deal about our mobility and overall wellbeing. Changes in walking speed, step length, and mobility aid usage can provide early signs of declining mobility or poor recovery after a fall, often before those changes become obvious in everyday care.

Today, care teams largely rely on occasional observations and scheduled assessments to understand a resident's mobility. A walk down the hallway, assistance getting out of a chair, or a physiotherapy appointment offers valuable insights, but captures only a small fraction of how a resident moves throughout the day.

Teton helps fill these gaps by automatically measuring gait during everyday walking, using ambient sensors already installed in care homes. By tracking mobility over time, care teams gain a more complete picture of each resident's mobility, helping them recognize changes earlier and provide more personalized, proactive care.

What walking reveals about our health

The way we walk can tell us a surprising amount about our health. Walking speed, for example, is considered such a useful indicator of overall health that it is sometimes referred to as the “sixth vital sign” [1]. Research involving more than 34,000 older adults has even found an association between walking speed and survival [2].

Our gait, the manner we walk, has more to it than how fast we move. Step length, timing and rhythm describe different aspects of mobility that can be linked with aging, neurological conditions and falls [3, 4, 5, 6].

Importantly, gait is not static. It can change gradually as strength, balance, or confidence decline, or more suddenly following an illness or fall. These changes may be difficult to recognize from occasional observations, particularly when they develop over weeks or months.

This makes everyday walking a valuable source of information for care teams. By measuring gait consistently over time, it becomes possible to establish what is normal for each resident and recognize meaningful deviations from their usual patterns. These insights can help care staff and physiotherapists identify emerging mobility concerns, monitor recovery, and make more informed care decisions.

Gait measurement built into the room

Teton’s gait measurements build on top of the technology and hardware already installed in care homes. Residents do not need any wearables, carry phones, attach visual markers or initiate a directed test. The residents or staff do not need to remember to charge any batteries and we do not install any additional gait-specific equipment in the room.

Instead, the Teton system estimates the resident’s body movement in 3D over time. It identifies the steps within a walk, and uses their timing and position to calculate gait measurements. It is able to extract mobility information, usually gathered during a dedicated assessment, into the place where a resident already lives. All of this happens automatically in the background, without requiring residents or staff to do anything.

In our field validation study, we found strong agreement between Teton and the GAITRite reference system for walking speed, step and stride timing and length. As Table 1 shows, Teton’s accuracy is comparable to, and on several measures better than, published results from Apple, Google and OneStep.

Smartphones and smartwatches have shown that useful gait measurements can come from everyday devices. For Teton, the practical advantage is that these measurements are collected through an existing in-room device and do not require the resident to wear, charge or manage anything.

Please read our technical whitepaper Ambient Gait Assessment with Teton where we describe the study and results in full.

Turning gait measurements into better care

For care staff, tracking mobility over time provides a fuller picture of how residents move throughout their day. Changes in walking speed or step length that might go unnoticed during brief encounters become easier to observe when compared with a resident's usual walking patterns.

For physiotherapists, everyday gait measurements offer additional context between appointments, making it possible to follow mobility trends and see how walking patterns evolve outside supervised sessions.

Available directly in the Teton app, these measurements complement everyday observations and help care teams build a more complete understanding of each resident's mobility.

The examples below illustrate how everyday walking can reveal changes in mobility over time. Each follows a resident over 14 days, tracking walking speed, stride length, double support time, and forward trunk lean. Teton also automatically records events such as falls and walking aid use, alongside other measurements like sleep and respiration, providing a more complete picture of daily activity and wellbeing.

By comparing each resident's measurements with their own earlier patterns, changes become easier to recognize.

Select a resident to explore their story.

A fuller picture of everyday mobility

Our field validation demonstrates that Teton can accurately measure key gait characteristics during everyday walking. Built on the sensors already installed in care homes, these measurements require no wearables, additional equipment, or dedicated assessments.

By capturing walking patterns in residents' own rooms, Teton extends mobility observation beyond occasional staff encounters and scheduled assessments. Over time, these measurements provide care teams with a more complete, objective picture of how each resident moves, complementing their everyday observations and understanding of the resident.