Mobility and ageing

Project overview

Ageing is generally associated with a decrease in mobility and social interaction and this decrease can be dependent upon various health and social factors.

Sustaining levels of activity are important for successful ageing and for those for whom mobility is a problem suffer in a variety of ways.

Social lives become restricted and the less mobile become more limited in terms of their access to nutrition, leisure and other activities leading to dependence on others for visits to shops and to use other services.

Although mobility is an issue for ageing there are two gaps in knowledge. Firstly we know relatively little about mobility in the oldest-old and secondly there are methodological problems in that determining the extent to which older people are active in their environment have been limited largely to self-report studies.

Findings

New metrics for exploring the relationship between mobility and successful ageing (PDF, 1.3MB)

View all project findings.

Further information

For more information, read the full project details.