Borger, J. N. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2018

Tasks and responsibilities in physical activity promotion of older patients during hospitalization: A nurse perspective

ObjectiveTo investigate how nurses perceive tasks and responsibilities in promoting physical activity during hospitalization of older patients and which factors are of influence.\n\nDesignObservational cohort study\n\nSetting and participantsOne hundred and eight nurse students, nurses and nurse supervisors employed by an academic Dutch teaching hospital participated in a questionnaire survey and 51 nurses took part in a subsequent in-depth interview.\n\nMeasuresData were collected on tasks and responsibilities in physical activity promotion and their influencing factors as perceived by nurses. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data from the questionnaire survey and a deductive approach with directed content analysis was used for the data from the interviews.\n\nResultsNurses perceived to have a dominant role in physical activity promotion of older patients during hospitalization. Ninety percent of the nurses stated to be responsible for physical activity promotion and 32 percent stated to be satisfied with the actual level of physical activity of their patients. Influencing factors were low patient motivation, high workload causing priority shifts of tasks and the role of physicians.\n\nConclusionAlthough their perceived dominant role in physical activity promotion, nurses identified a number of barriers interfering with actual level of physical activity. Improvement strategies should involve physicians, patients and carers.

scientific communication and education↗

bioRxiv2018

Capturing sleep-wake cycles by using day-to-day smartphone touchscreen interactions

Body movements drop with sleep and this behavioural signature is widely exploited to infer sleep duration. However, a reduction in body movements may also occur in periods of intense cognitive activity and the ubiquitous use of smartphones may capture these wakeful periods otherwise hidden in the standard measures of sleep. Here we continuously captured the gross body movements using standard wrist-worn accelerometers to quantify sleep (actigraphy) and logged the timing of the day-to-day touchscreen events ( tappigraphy). Using these measures, we addressed how the gross body movements overlap with the cognitively engaging digital behaviour (from n = 84 individuals, accumulating 1384 nights). We find that smartphone use was distributed across a broad spectrum of physical activity levels but consistently peaked at rest. We estimated the putative sleep onset and wake-up times from the actigraphy data to find that these times were well correlated to the estimates from tappigraphy (R2 = 0.9 for sleep onset and wake-up time). However, actigraphy overestimated sleep as virtually all of the users used their phones during the putative sleep period. Interestingly, the probability of touches remained greater than zero for ~ 2 h after the putative sleep onset and ~ 2 h before the putative wake-up time. Our findings suggest that touchscreen interactions are widely integrated into modern sleeping habits - surrounding both sleep onset and waking-up periods - yielding a new approach to measuring sleep. Smartphone taps can be leveraged to update the behavioural signatures of sleep with these peculiarities of modern digital behaviour.

animal behavior and cognition↗