The Influence of Wearable Devices as Goal Setting for Rural Older Adults on Physical Activity and Using Behavior

Abstract

Background: Activity trackers have become a popular means to motivate people to monitor their physical activity levels and maintain regular active lifestyles However little attention has been paid to the effects of activity tracker use among older adults Therefore this study tested the activity trackers and supplied goal setting to increase physical activity (PA) for older adults who live in rural areas Method: A total of 30 older adults living in a rural county in Taiwan wore activity trackers daily for six consecutive weeks Participants were divided into two groups: One group were received individualized goal setting every week as the other group were received universal goal (10000 steps daily) setting every week The measures include activity trackers in conjunction with The International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ) use of the functional test and a semi-structured interview Analysis: All the data organized and imported into SPSS 18 0 Descriptive statistics applied to present the characteristics of the participants Wilcoxon signed-rank test was adopted to examine the change in physical activity levels measured by activity trackers and IPAQ in six weeks Mann-Whitney U test was designed to examine goal setting effects between individualized group and universal group Spearman correlation was to be utilized to examine the relationship between objective and subjective measurement in rural elders’ physical activity level Results: The mean age of the participants was 77 5 years (range: 61–88 years) A total of 66 7% were women Most of the participants had little education; 30% were illiterate and 60% had only graduated from elementary school Among the participants 55% did not use mobile phones The participants showed significant increase in physical activity in terms of objective measurement from the activity tracker with the average steps The measures indicated individual group increased their mean daily step count from 4401 to 6648 steps per day (p=0 002) while the universal group steps also changed of 3752 steps/day (range 794– 15026) in week 1 to 6297 steps/day (range 1084– 18068) in week 6 (p

Date of Award	2019
Original language	English
Supervisor	Hsueh-Wen Chow (Supervisor)