Background: Activity monitors have been introduced in the last years to objectively measure physical activity to help physicians in the management of musculoskeletal patients.

Objective: This systematic review aimed at describing the assessment of physical activity by commercially available portable activity monitors in patients with musculoskeletal disorders.

Methods: PubMed, Embase, PEDro, Web of Science, Scopus and CENTRAL databases were systematically searched from inception to June 11th, 2020. We considered as eligible observational studies with: musculoskeletal patients; physical activity measured by wearable sensors based on inertial measurement units; comparisons performed with other tools; outcomes consisting of number of steps/day, activity/inactivity time, or activity counts/day.

Results: Out of 595 records, after removing duplicates, title/abstract and full text screening, 10 articles were included. We noticed a wide heterogeneity in the wearable devices, that resulted to be 10 different types. Patients included suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, juvenile idiopathic arthritis, polymyalgia rheumatica, and fibromyalgia. Only 3 studies compared portable activity trackers with objective measurement tools.

Conclusions: Taken together, this systematic review showed that activity monitors might be considered as useful to assess physical activity in patients with musculoskeletal disorders, albeit, to date, the high device heterogeneity and the different algorithms still prevent their standardization.

Download full-text PDF

Source
http://dx.doi.org/10.3233/BMR-200348DOI Listing

Publication Analysis

Top Keywords

physical activity
20
activity monitors
16
patients musculoskeletal
12
systematic review
12
activity
10
musculoskeletal disorders
8
portable activity
8
physical
5
patients
5
musculoskeletal
5

Similar Publications

Want AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?

Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!