What Types of Activity Places Make Older Adults Walk More and Further Away From Home?

Being mobile and physically active is critical to maintain health and wellbeing in older age. Higher individual mobility—often measured by life space levels and daily mobility indicators—is associated with a higher sense of independence and access to more diverse activity places and opportunities including necessities, physical activities, and social interactions in daily life of older adults. Particularly, as a fundamental physical activity, engagement in outdoor walking is a proxy of physical activeness as well as a predictor of health status and morbidity in later life. Such an outdoor walking activity can be promoted or suppressed depending on a trip purpose (e.g., utilitarian vs. recreational) and an activity place’s characteristics (e.g., duration of stay, visit frequency, distance from home). Hence, it is important to consider individual mobility, trip purpose, and activity place characteristics to understand in what personal and environmental context outdoor walking can be conducted more, which has not been much explored in existing studies.

In this study, we mainly focus on interplays between outdoor walking, individual mobility, trip purpose, and activity place’s traits in the daily life of community-dwelling older adults aged 65-91 who live in Switzerland, participated in the Mobility, Activity, and Social Interactions Study (MOASIS), and conducted location tracking via a GPS sensor over 30 days. With GPS data processing and semantic annotation of GPS trajectories based on OpenStreetMap data, daily mobility indicators and life space levels were calculated, activity places were detected, and trip purposes associated with activity places were inferred. We found that trips for recreational walking or other exercise occur further away from home than trips with other purposes. Trips for entertainment and social visits are accompanied with walking more than other trip purposes. To refine types of activity places, we will characterize each activity place by participant’s visiting patterns and trip purpose and conduct a latent class analysis. Relations between activity place types and outdoor walking will be further explored.