McMaster is driving a global effort to understand how mobility affects aging with new guidelines that use wearable technology to measure movement.
In a recently published book paper in age and aging, The McMaster team helped establish minimum standards for using devices such as accelerometers and GPS technology to track people’s movements in their daily lives. The international group of researchers also set priorities for future research that could change the way age-related health problems are prevented and monitored.
“Research groups around the world use wearable technology to measure health and mobility very differently and study them in silos, making comparisons across studies difficult and limiting overall progress,” said lead author of the paper McMaster Monitoring My Mobility, which used wearable technology to track the daily mobility of 1,500 people over several years. said Mara Beauchamp, director of the cohort study called (MacM3).
In developing MacM3 and the Canadian Longitudinal Study of Aging (CLSA) wearable protocols, Beecham and his fellow researchers realized that when it comes to understanding how people move using wearables, the field is essentially a patchwork of devices and techniques. Without a common playbook.
“More and more research is using wearables because the data can provide valuable information about someone’s daily activities that you can’t get from surveys or laboratory tests of physical performance,” Beecham explains.
The World Health Organization, in its global action plan on physical activity, also promotes wearables to measure population-wide health and help individuals monitor their movements.
The recent paper is the result of a 2024 conference that brought together 24 international experts in aging, mobility and digital health, hosted by the McMaster Institute on Aging in collaboration with the University of Birmingham.
The group reached consensus on 20 key mobility measures derived from devices and 30 guidelines for how data is collected and used in older adult populations.
Researchers were asked to agree on criteria for mobility metrics, including the wearable’s location on a person’s body, ease of access to data, length of data collection period, and how data is processed once collected.
It was a “fantastic global effort” and everyone worked hard to build consensus in the first-of-its-kind exercise, Beecham said. How strongly people felt that this work needed to be done now. ”
Mr. McMaster’s leadership in aging and mobility builds on Canada’s initiatives in this area, as Canada was an early global leader in integrating wearable-based physical activity measurements into national surveillance. Statistics Canada introduced accelerometer-based measurements in the Canadian Health Measures Survey starting in 2007, and wearables have become more prevalent in health research over the past two decades.
“The promise of these devices is that we will eventually be able to tailor health interventions based on an individual’s needs in a more sophisticated way,” Beauchamp says. “But we need to do some ground-level scientific work to ensure that the recommendations are based on the best available evidence and that the measurements are actually valid and reliable.”
She points to the widely circulated idea that adults need to walk 10,000 steps each day, and says that goal may be unwise and technically unattainable for older adults.
“Wearables have helped us understand how much movement is needed to reduce the risk of various health effects, but the picture is much more nuanced than setting one goal that everyone can achieve.”
International experts have agreed on five key priorities to make wearable technology truly useful in supporting healthy aging.
- Track people over time. Linking wearable data with long-term health outcomes reveals how changes in mobility are related to aging and disease.
- Development of digital biomarkers. Measurements such as walking speed and balance can help detect health problems early.
- Add context to movement. Knowing not only how much people move, but also where and how they move, will improve our understanding of mobility and health.
- Make technology accessible to older people. Algorithms need to be validated on people with different abilities, not just healthy young people.
- Integrating wearables into healthcare. For wearable data to improve care, it must fit into clinical workflows in meaningful ways.
Challenges also include a lack of representation from low- to middle-income countries and concerns about “black box” approaches to processing and analyzing data collected by commercial products.
Establishing these standards for wearable technology is “just the beginning” and more work is needed to move the field forward, Beecham says, but consensus work is already informing discussions with the WHO. global guidance for Measuring and monitoring physical activity.