From distance to context: GPS-derived life-space mapping in older adults with and without dementia

As individuals age, changes in cognitive health can alter how they engage with their environments, with disruptions in daily life participation potentially signaling emerging challenges. Life-space, which quantifies the spatial extent and frequency of an individual's movement, provides a lens to capture changes. While life-space has been studied among community-dwelling older adults, its application in dementia remains limited, despite the unique ways cognition may shape mobility and interactions with place. Most Global Positioning System (GPS)-based life-space studies rely on aggregate metrics that describe how far people travel but provide limited insight into what kinds of places they visit or how mobility is structured by activity context. This proof-of-concept study explores the feasibility of integrating GPS mobility data with contextual information to create zoned life-space maps and examines whether this framework can reveal interpretable mobility patterns in a small sample of older adults with and without dementia. Seventeen participants (10 cognitively intact, 7 with dementia) were monitored for four weeks, generating over 34,000 location points. An updated stop-segmentation algorithm identified stops and trajectories, while activity types were inferred using OpenStreetMap and a probability-based method. Stops were colour-coded by activity and mapped within three zones (neighbourhood, town, beyond) to produce life-space visualizations. In this small sample, participants with dementia tended to exhibit shorter travel distances, fewer unique destinations, and lower location entropy in the neighbourhood and town zones. Life-space maps illustrated differences in engagement, routine, and purpose not readily captured by aggregated metrics alone, supporting the feasibility of place-based GPS life-space mapping.