Active Seating System to Lessen Sedentariness in Older Adults: In-home Testing Phase

Study Summary

FitSitt is an innovative device tailored to older adults that increases the convenience of breaking up sedentary activity and incorporating physical activity into in-home daily routines. This comprehensive seating solution merges features of a posture chair, exercise machine, rehabilitation tool, and activity tracker. Its primary purpose is to reduce daily immobile time, offering users a convenient means for replacing sedentary bouts with varying intensities of physical activity, ultimately leading to improved health. FitSitt aims to improve the baseline activity profile of its users by providing a comprehensive wellness solution including a non-disruptive in-home means for physical activity engagement while allowing users to continue participation in desired seated activities. In so doing, FitSitt has the potential to decrease health-harmful sedentary activity in a wide variety of high-risk individuals and occupational contexts. The initial development of FitSitt for this Phase I proposal, however, will target community-dwelling older adults. Co-led by Activ Sitting, Inc. and USC, Phase I will include three study phases (i.e., focus group, in-lab testing, in-home testing) to determine user acceptability, feasibility of procedures, safety, and preliminary efficacy to affect health and behavior outcomes. Clinical trial activities occur within the in-home testing stage and will focus on user acceptability and preliminary efficacy to affect health and behavioral outcomes. This information will be used along with other information collected from the overall study to redesign and enhance the current FitSitt prototype and prepare the system to be tested in a fully powered Phase II study of the enhanced FitSitt's efficacy to improve health in community-living older people. As currently designed, FitSitt provides convenience, comfort, and health value-add for myriad older adults, ensuring scalability and sustainability of broad use across communities and markets. This proj

Primary Outcome

Daily prolonged sedentary bouts (objective sedentary activity) will be measured in real time using the activPAL thigh-worn accelerometer during a 72-hour monitoring period before introduction of FitSitt (i.e., pre-intervention) and throughout a 3- to 7-day long monitoring period when FitSitt is present (i.e., intervention-present). "Prolonged" sedentary bouts is identified by an activPAL proprietary algorithm of sedentariness \>= 30 minutes in duration, and will be merged with data captured with

Interventions

• DEVICE FitSitt Prototype