As populations age and more people live with multiple long-term conditions and frailty, loss of mobility is increasing making it a WHO global health priority.

Walking is a fundamental part of daily life. It enables people to carry out everyday activities and maintain their independence. Regardless of health status, mobility is important to people's quality of life and is increasingly recognised as an important marker of health. While mobility is routinely assessed in clinics and research settings, these assessments do not always reflect how people move in their everyday lives.

Aspects of walking and gait are important markers of health associated with both beneficial and adverse health outcomes. Reliably assessing change in one’s mobility in the real-world environment provides a novel measure of health and function to drive inclusive therapeutic innovation, improve clinical management and support more personalised care.

A new approach to mobility assessment

Mobilise-D is a large academic-industry collaboration funded through the European Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking. The consortium brought together experts from 22 academic institutions, 12 industry partners from pharmaceutical, technology and clinical research organisations, and people living with a range of health conditions and mobility impairments.
Building on previous work, Mobilise-D has delivered the first systematic approach to real-world mobility assessment that is standardised, validated and freely available.

Funding from NIHR Biomedical Research Centre (BRC): Newcastle supported the development and validation of digital tools using wearable technologies to measure both clinic-based and real-world gait outcomes for diagnosis, disease monitoring and prediction. This funding helped establish and develop expertise and capacity that provided early proof of concept for discrete mobility measures and demonstrated the potential of digital health technologies to support innovation in clinical trials and care. It extended expertise and supported successful research awards, culminating in Mobilise-D and other funded research.

Innovation across healthcare, research and industry

This work has led to innovations in how mobility loss is measured and is helping to drive innovations in therapeutic development to treat it through real-world, low cost, inclusive solutions using digital health technology; providing the tools to drive modernisation, standardisation and efficiency for research and care.

Mobilise-D has established mobility as a core health concept that can be identified, monitored and targeted therapeutically, helping to ensure it is recognised as an important measure of health and wellbeing. The programme has also provided tools to support more precise, sensitive and patient-centred clinical trials and treatment development, creating new opportunities to evaluate therapies in ways that better reflect patients' everyday experiences.

By delivering technical standards and algorithms for mobility assessment, the programme has helped stimulate innovation in digital health technologies and support the development of more accessible and standardised approaches to measuring mobility. The work has also contributed to the development of regulatory pathways for mobility assessment in the evaluation of new therapies, helping to shape future standards for its wider use in research and healthcare.

In addition, the consortium has built knowledge and skills across academia, healthcare and industry, helping prepare the future workforce to deliver sustainable digital health solutions. By developing standardised, acceptable, feasible and scalable approaches to mobility assessment, the programme has reduced barriers to implementation and created opportunities for wider adoption in research, clinical management and personalised healthcare.

This work is delivering impact across multiple sectors, including drug and therapeutic development, technology innovation, healthcare, research, regulation and society. By providing the first standardised, validated and freely available approach to measuring mobility in everyday life, Mobilise-D is helping to modernise mobility assessment and create new opportunities for research, clinical management and personalised care.

Scaling impact

Follow-on funding through SUSTAIN Mobilise-D and other research programmes continued to build on previous achievements, while the Mobilise-D Network supported ongoing collaboration between researchers, industry partners, healthcare professionals and patients. Insights from the programme also informed research in Parkinson's disease, dementia and other areas of research across the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre: Newcastle.
Mobilise-D concluded in June 2024, but its impact continues through ongoing research, international regulatory engagement and wider adoption of its methods. The programme established a strong foundation for the use of real-world mobility assessment in clinical trials, healthcare and drug development, with its algorithms now being integrated into commercial technologies.