Measuring 24-h use of time in people with a diabetes-related foot ulcer: A feasibility study

Physical activity (PA), sleep and sedentary time are now recognised as mutually exclusive and exhaustive parts of the 24-h day-if PA decreases, time spent sleeping, being sedentary or both must increase so that all components equate to 24 h. Recent advances in time-use epidemiology suggest that we should not consider time-use domains (PA, sleep and sedentary time) in isolation from each other, but in terms of a composition-the mix of time-use domains across the 24-h day. While interrelated daily activities are known to be important in the management of diabetes mellitus, few studies have investigated the interrelated daily activities in people with an active diabetes-related foot ulcer (DFU) and their impact on important outcomes such as wound severity, blood glucose control and health-related quality of life (HRQoL). This feasibility study aims to determine the acceptability and practicality of measuring 24-h use of time data in people with a DFU and its associations on important outcome measures for this population.

Participants wore a wrist-worn accelerometer for two weeks and completed demographic and HRQoL questionnaires. Outcomes were participant engagement, reported levels of study burden and value and compositional data analysis as a methodological approach for evaluating 24-h use of time data.

Twenty-six participants reported low levels of study burden and rated the study value highly. The protocol appears feasible in terms of recruitment (81%) and retention rate (86%). On average, participants were relatively sedentary spending 747, 172 and 18 min in sedentary time, light physical activity and moderate-to-vigorous activity, respectively. Sleep appeared adequate with participants obtaining an average of 485 min, but quality of sleep was notably poor with average sleep efficiency of 75%. Compositional data analysis was able to quantify the integrated associations of 24-h use of time with HRQoL.

The protocol provides an acceptable method to collect 24-h use of time data in people with a DFU. Efforts to consider and analyse PA as part of a 24-h activity composition may provide holistic and realistic understandings of PA in this clinical population.