SMARTMOVE: Validating clinically relevant mobility measures derived from wearable technology in older Canadians

Mobility problems, like difficulty walking or climbing stairs, are a strong predictor of falls and hospitalization in older people. Accordingly, researchers and health care providers have paid lots of attention to monitoring mobility as an indicator of healthy aging. Over the last 10 years, many advancements have been made to wearable devices that allow for continuous and longer-term monitoring of real-life mobility. Real-life mobility measurement has the potential to be a useful and powerful approach for monitoring the health of older people. However, before we can adopt this kind of technology on a larger scale, we must first understand how the mobility information we get from wearable devices relates to health outcomes in older people. We also need to understand how much change in the wearable mobility data is needed to be clinically important. This project will make use of an existing study in older people that is tracking the everyday mobility of up to 1500 participants using wearable devices. We will ask participants in SMARTMOVE to be part of the study for another 2 years and we will carefully monitor important outcomes like falls, hospital admission, and development of disability. In this way, we will be able to check that mobility data we get from the wearable devices are valid for predicting important health outcomes and for measuring change over time.