Co-developing a sustainable, meaningful, digital platform to enhance mobility and active ageing of community dwelling older adults (>75 years).

Our team approach to investigating mobility in old age starts with understanding how mobility relates to the well-being of an older person. The WHO definition of mobility includes facilitating access to quality mobility aids and devices, https://www.who.int/disabilities/media/news/personal_mobility/en/ . We will use a standardised definition of physical activity (PA) and exercise as follows: Physical Activity is any bodily movement produced by the contraction of skeletal muscles that result in a substantial increase in caloric requirements over resting energy expenditure.

Exercise is a type of PA consisting of planned, structured, and repetitive bodily movement undertaken to improve and/or maintain one or more components of physical fitness.

Our research team will follow the WHO model of age-friendly cities (figure above) to deliver a holistic approach from a multidisciplinary team working with a chain of supported-living providers (ExtraCare, https://www.extracare.org.uk/about-the-charity/the-trust-overview/ ) to assess mobility in its wider context; an older person's fitness level, physical environment, social environment, and municipal services. Older people communities/villages in ExtraCare offer an ideal environment to qualify and quantify how a population of older people continue to mobilise and increase their physical activity.

Our proposal pillars around understanding the problem, co-developing strategies, customising/ individualising solutions and testing and evaluating them in real life settings (enriched environment).

A holistic approach to understanding mobility within a safety and well-being agenda by engaging with older people, their formal and informal carers, and providers of supported-living is crucial.

Co-developing a person-centred understanding of what matters to older people will enable understanding the impact of mobility and the wide range of benefits from physical activity. We will work with a group of diverse (e.g. gender, ethnicity, mobility, cognitive functions and socio-economics) older people aged 75 and above in their independent-living environment.

We argue that working closely with older people in a range of contexts, and sites across the country but within one organisation (ExtraCare), can deliver a minimum mobility-dataset on a digital platform.