Researchers from the University of Sydney have begun trialling the use of state-of-the-art wearable technology within the Sax Institute’s 45 and Up Study.
The pilot will test the feasibility of 45 and Up Study participants wearing accelerometry devices on the wrist or thigh. The devices will track physical behaviour – encompassing physical activity, sedentary behaviour and sleep – over seven days.
Professor Emmanuel Stamatakis, director of the Mackenzie Wearables Hub at the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre, is leading the pilot and believes it has enormous potential for investigating the impact of movement on health outcomes.
“We’ve just begun to scratch the surface on understanding the relationship between our physical behaviour and the risk of disease,” Prof Stamatakis says.
“The 45 and Up Study could add huge methodological and translational value to this field of research, given the size of the cohort and the study’s linkages with hospital and mortality records – it is by far the most exciting Australian cohort study to test wearables at scale.”
Up until recently, almost all Australian large-scale research on the link between activity and disease has used evidence from questionnaire-based studies which, while valuable, leaves big gaps in our understanding, says Prof Stamatakis.
“Physical activity, sitting and sleep are all part of a 24-hour cycle, so spending time in one behaviour displaces time in another. That’s why it’s important to examine them together using a coherent method that captures them all.”
Prof Stamatakis is committed to building a global data resource using wearable technology. He is the founder and leader of The Prospective Physical Activity, Sitting and Sleep Consortium (ProPASS), which began in 2017 and now includes more than 30 studies around the world.
The pilot study is important because the feasibility of wearable technology can be country and population-specific, says Prof Stamatakis. “We need to test-run the devices and fine tune our method for the 45 and Up cohort specifically.”
The 45 and Up Study could become the first major cohort globally where participants wear accelerometers on their wrist and thigh at the same time, providing a more complete picture of their physical behaviour patterns.
“When we began ProPASS, the technology around processing data from wrist-worn devices was still rudimentary, so thigh-worn devices were the standard,” says Prof Stamatakis. “But now we may be able to use both to understand different aspects of movement related behaviour, which could substantially improve our understanding of the health effects of movement.”
If the pilot study is successful, accelerometry devices could be used by tens of thousands of 45 and Up Study participants. “If we were able to do a baseline measurement and then repeat it in four to five years cycles or so, that could be a game-changer for the field,” he says.
Prof Stamatakis and his team have an initial focus on investigating the link between movement and risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer, but in the future there’ll be scope for the Australian research community to use the data to address questions on a long list of health outcomes that related to lifestyles.
“It could be an amazing resource for the whole research community interested in tackling non-communicable disease – the sky’s the limit.”
Wearable technology is a promising new research avenue for the 45 and Up Study, with more projects due to start later this year.
To find out more about running a research project with the 45 and Up Study, contact 45andUp.research@saxinstitute.org.au.
