Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-22-2019

Abstract

Objectives

The number of elderly people is growing rapidly and aging is found to affect activities of daily living. Older adults are found to perform less physical activity when compared to younger ones. In the perspective of movement behavior, it is not well understood how are elderly different from younger ones. It is not known whether they produce only low frequency movement accelerations or the overall number of movements produced are reduced in elderly. It is also not known how elderly and younger ones perform movement transitions throughout the duration of a day and during night-time sleep.

Material and methods

In this study, 10 healthy young and 10 healthy old participants wore inertial measurement unit at their lower back for 3-days. The 24 hours of day were divided into four 6 hour time zones and transitions made by young and elderly were investigated. All participants performed their regular daily activities unhindered and longitudinal multi-day signals for acceleration and angular velocity were analyzed. Time-frequency analysis was performed using wavelet transform and frequency content of each movement performed was computed.

Results

We found that both young and older adults performed significantly more low amplitude movements than medium and high amplitude movements. Healthy young adults produced significantly more movements at 1.1 Hz than older adults. Healthy young adults were also found to have produced significantly smaller number of transitions in the mid-phases of sleep. They were also found to produce significantly larger accelerations during night-time sleep transitions than their older counterparts.

Conclusion

The advantages of collecting longitudinal data about human movement and sleep transition data can lead us to important clinical diagnosis. The information from longitudinal assessment can help develop lifestyle interventions for disease prevention, monitoring of chronic diseases to prevent or slow disease progression among elderly people.

Comments

NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in IRBM. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in IRBM, volume 41, issue 2, in 2019. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.irbm.2019.10.002

The Creative Commons license below applies only to this version of the article.

Peer Reviewed

1

Copyright

Elsevier

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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