Motility in older adults: Operationalization of a new framework and first insights into its relationship with real-life mobility

Staying mobile as we grow older is fundamental to active aging and it is also linked to health status. Since mobility is a complex construct, to fully understand it, we need to look into all possible influential factors. In an attempt to cover all aspects that could potentially have an effect on mobility, Kaufmann (2017) recently developed the comprehensive concept of “motility” which is defined as “the potential of a person to be mobile” and includes three categories of determinants: 1. Access, 2. Skills, 3. Appropriation. This concept has been applied mostly in qualitative studies and with very specific samples. Primary aim of this pilot project is to develop a quantitative operationalization model for motility, especially tailored to community-dwelling older adults and secondary aim is to look into the relationships between real-life mobility and motility in this target group. Real-life mobility will be measured using smartphone technology over 2 weeks, collecting physical activity (e.g. active time, sedentary time, nr. of steps) as well as spatial, out-of-home mobility (e.g. life-space, action-range, time out-of-home) data. A pool of appropriate measures for the operationalization of the three motility categories (access, skills and appropriation) has been created and part of this pilot project is to select the most relevant measures for each category, which will be assessed and used for further analyses. This proposal presents an important extension of our group’s earlier work on defining the determinants of older adult’s real-life mobility. Knowledge about the amount of contributions that the three motility categories make for real-life mobility of older adults will contribute to a better understanding of the influencing factors of real-life mobility for this target group and thus the design of effective interventions aiming to promote independent mobility for community-dwelling older adults.