Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

The ability to mobilize is an essential component of quality of life for older adults. The purpose of this study is to assess the factors influencing the willingness and ability of older adults living at home in Brazil to perform a simple activity designed to maintain mobility. This simple activity is the act of repeatedly standing up from a chair and sitting down and can be completed in the context of daily life. My proposed study builds on research completed with older adults living in Canadian long-term care facilities. Residents with dementia who practiced standing up and sitting down two to four times a day had better mobility and ability to complete daily activities compared with a similar group who did not do the sit-to-stand activity. The elegant simplicity of the intervention, which does not require specialized training or equipment, has the potential to be spread to other cultural and geographic contexts. This research is significant because of an aging international population that could benefit from a low-cost mobility-enhancing activity that does not require specialized equipment or training.