This paper provides an overview of the medical scales which are currently in practice at the geriatrics departmentof the hospital for assessing independence and mobility of elderly patients. Several shortcomings and issues relatedto the scales are identified. It is shown how a 3D camera system could be used for the automatic assessmentof several items of the scales. this automated assessment is overcoming many of the issues with the existingmethods. An analysis of the automatically identified activity features of a typical patient is used to compare thedata derived from our system with data obtained with accelerometer readings.