Investigating collective impacts of physical activity, sedentary time and sleep duration on mobility outcomes in older Canadians: A compositional data analysis approach within the MacM3 project

The distribution of time spent in daily movement behaviours (physical activity, sedentary time, sleep duration) over the course of a day (24-H) has implications for mobility outcomes in older adults.

For this project, a novel analytic technique called compositional data analysis (CoDA) will be applied to movement behaviour data leveraged from the MacM3 study to examine differences in how older adults with differing mobility levels allocate their time across daily movement behaviours and to determine and identify the optimal distribution of time spent in these behaviours for favourable mobility outcomes.

To date, the impacts of movement behaviours on older adult health outcomes have primarily been studied using traditional statistical techniques which may lead to erroneous conclusions because they treat movement behaviours as independent form each other, and do not account for the fact that the time spent in these behaviours make up a composition of fixed time of 24-H a day.