Voluntary movement is an essential building block of practically all roles an older individual might hold. Therefore, I postulate that physical activity and sedentary behaviour may be indicators of the ability of an older individual to maintain quality of life. The purposes of the present program of research are 1) to develop a method to capture bodily movement of older people in free-living conditions, 2) to validate this method with respect to established assessments of quality of life, 3) to examine the trajectories of physical behaviour in free-living conditions among older people followed up for four years, and 4) to assess whether the trajectories of physical behaviour are reflected in changes of quality of life. The main novelty is in evaluating patterning of physical activity and sedentary behaviour using accumulation and patterning metrics, and in utilising machine learning clustering techniques to evaluate the effects of physical behaviour trajectory on quality of life.

2019

2024