RESEARCH AND EVIDENCE
Falls While Using Wheeled Walkers
Video analysis of real falls during walking, turning, standing and transfers with rollators and two-wheeled walkers.
Who Carried Out The Study?
Kimberly A. Nickerson, Kailey Diaz and Brittney C. Muir. University of Washington and VA Puget Sound.
Assistive Technology, 36(3), 248 to 253 (online 2023). Original title: Circumstances of falls among older adult walker users in long-term care and the associated walker design deficits. DOI: 10.1080/10400435.2023.2267623.
What Did They Do?
Researchers reviewed 41 videos from two retirement facilities. Excluding five misuse incidents and two without walker contact left 34 falls involving 16 people: seven with two-wheeled walkers and 27 with rollators. Five individuals fell repeatedly.
What Did They Find About Repeated Falls?
Three of seven two-wheeled-walker falls occurred sideways while turning; 12 of 27 rollator falls occurred backwards during transfers. The authors identified manoeuvrability, lateral stability and wheel-speed control as design concerns.
What Were People Doing When They Fell?
Activities across all 34 analysed falls. Counts describe recorded incidents, not the probability of falling during each activity. Original chart prepared by Mobility UK from the reported counts.
What Can We Take From This?
A walking aid needs to suit the person and the movements they actually make, including turns and transfers. These observations support questions about fit, training and support during changes of direction. They cannot tell us whether a different device would have prevented an individual incident.
What Are The Limits?
This small, selected sample cannot establish national fall rates, comparative device safety or LifeGlider outcomes. Video quality and the long-term-care setting limit interpretation and generalisability.
Evidence about a problem is different from evidence that a particular product solves it. This page is Mobility UK’s explanation of independent research. The researchers do not endorse LifeGlider.
Read The Complete Study
The report includes two charts, two main tables and three appendix tables. No direct video supplement is provided. No explicit Creative Commons licence was identified for the manuscript; original text and figures are linked rather than republished.
Our PDF is an original factual summary, not a rebranded copy of the paper. Download options for the full report are provided by the original host.
Can I Watch The Falls Footage?
We traced the research footage to Simon Fraser University’s long-term-care fall archive. Public and restricted collections have different access conditions. We have not confirmed which publicly viewable clips match the walker incidents analysed here.
Explore the original video sources