Accelerometer-measured physical activity in mid-age Australian adults

Abstract

Background Raw data from accelerometers can provide valuable insights into specific attributes of physical activity, such as time spent in intensity-specific activity. The aim of this study was to describe physical activity assessed with raw data from triaxial wrist-worn accelerometers in mid-age Australian adults. Methods Data were from 700 mid-age adults living in Brisbane, Australia (mean age: 60.4; SD:7.1 years). Data from a non-dominant wrist worn triaxial accelerometer (Actigraph wGT3X-BT), expressed as acceleration in gravitational equivalent units (1 mg = 0.001 g), were used to estimate time spent in moderate-vigorous intensity physical activity (MVPA; >100 mg) using different bout criteria (non-bouted, 1-, 5-, and 10-min bouts), and the proportion of participants who spent an average of at least one minute per day in vigorous physical activity. Results Mean acceleration was 23.2 mg (SD: 7.5) and did not vary by gender (men: 22.4; women: 23.7; p-value: 0.073) or education (p-value: 0.375). On average, mean acceleration was 10% (2.5 mg) lower per decade of age from age 55y. The median durations in non-bouted, 1-min, 5-min and 10-min MVPA bouts were, respectively, 68 (25th -75th : 45–99), 26 (25th -75th : 12–46), 10 (25th -75th : 3–24) and 8 (25th -75th : 0–19) min/day. Around one third of the sample did at least one minute per day in vigorous intensity activities. Conclusion This population-based cohort provided a detailed description of physical activity based on raw data from accelerometers in mid-age adults in Australia. Such data can be used to investigate how different patterns and intensities of physical activity vary across the day/week and influence health outcomes.

Physical Activity Estimated by the Wearable Device in Lung Disease Patients: Exploratory Analyses of Prospective Observational Study

“…Therefore, we performed an additional subgroup analysis of cases of individuals aged 69 or younger, in which the difference in physical activity between patients and healthy controls has remained consistent, and the AUC in this subgroup is 0.732 (95%CI, 0.617 to 0.848), which is not as inferior compared to that in all cases (0.764 (95%CI, 0.673 to 0.856)). The decrease in physical activity with age has been reported in the previous reports [9][10][11], which is consistent with our results. However, the female sex has also been reported to be associated with a decreased physical activity [10], which was not confirmed in our study, probably because of the imbalance in the proportion of male and female participants.…”

Habitual Physical Activity of People with or at Risk of Diabetes-Related Foot Complications

“…There are challenges to facilitating increased physical activity, and a variety of individual and social factors have been shown to influence physical activity uptake in adults such as age, income, rurality, and social support, and the relatively low physical activity and sleep duration reported in this study are consistent with non-urban, older populations [36][37][38]. These factors may contribute to the gap that exists between intent and actual behaviour, with as many as 46% of individuals failing to follow through with their long-term intentions regarding physical activity [39].…”

Day-to-day variability in accelerometer-measured physical activity in mid-aged Australian adults

“…In 2014, 767 participants who responded to the previous four mail surveys were randomly selected to participate in a sub-study to collect objective measures of physical functioning and physical activity. The protocol for the sub-study has also been previously published [ 15 – 17 ]. HABITAT received ethical clearance from the Queensland University of Technology Human Research Ethics Committee (ID numbers: 3967H & 1300000161).…”

“…Time in MVPA was based on identification of five second epochs when mean acceleration was at or above 100 m g. This threshold, which was generated in a laboratory calibration study with 29 healthy adults aged 18–65 [ 10 ], has been widely used in population-based studies to define moderate-to-vigorous intensity physical activity [ 12 , 15 , 19 , 20 ].…”

“…Another strength is that the HABITAT participants were randomly selected from areas in Brisbane which span ten deciles of socio-economic status, which ensured inclusion of participants with a wide range of social and economic backgrounds [ 14 , 28 ]. However, these data were from a sub-sample of the HABITAT cohort, which is a limitation, as the results may be less generalisable to all mid-age adults in Brisbane [ 15 ]. A second limitation is that exclusion of those who did not wear the accelerometer for the required number of hours and days, resulted in under inclusion of data from older participants, so our estimates of MVPA may be higher than in the general population of mid-age adults.…”