An objective time use study of people with mobility disabilities using GPS trackers

Understanding how people with mobility disabilities use their time provides an important perspective on community participation. For instance, spending excessive time in the home has been shown to lead to poor nutrition, physical inactivity and obesity. Some studies have used subjective measures of community participation. However, the purpose of this study was to use an objective approach to determine how much time is actually spent at home and how much time is spent at various community destinations. 77 individuals with mobility disabilities were given GPS trackers for seven days. Detailed information was logged about time spent at home and at community destinations. The majority of subjects (μ age = 51.8 ±14.8) were female (61%), African American (76.6%), not working (88.3%), made less than $10,000 per year (63.5%), and were obese (μ BMI = 34.1 ±12.9 kg/m2). Results showed that participants spent a mean of 150 hrs/week(89.3%) in their homes. Aside from home, participants spent 2.54 hrs/week(1.5%) at other residential settings (e.g., friends house), 1.94 hrs/week(1.2%) at medical settings, 1.50 hrs/week(0.9%) at commercial settings (e.g., fast food restaurants and retail stores), 0.58 hrs/week(0.4%) at recreation settings (e.g., parks and fitness centers), 0.32 hrs/week(0.2%) at grocery settings and 5.82 hrs/week(3.5%) at other locations. The disproportionate time spent at home and the lack of time spent in community settings other then medical and other residential settings illustrates that more work needs to be done to ensure that people with mobility disabilities are able to spend more time at health promoting community destinations.