Publications

Despite its widespread use in performance assessment, the reliability of vertical jump in an ageing population has not been addressed properly. The aim of the present study was to assess intra- and inter-day reliability of countermovement jump in healthy middle-aged (55–65 years) and older (66–75 years) men and women.

Aims As we age fluctuations in alertness and attention become more prevalent and can be the cause of errors and forgetfulness in day to day activities. This study aims to evaluate the efficacy of a completely self-administered GSR based biofeedback self-alerting training programme (SAT) in healthy older adults using a randomized controlled trial. We are looking to replicate the results of a smaller recently-completed single-blind randomised controlled pilot trial (N=20) of this training which showed statistically significant short-term improvements in executive function.

Portable tensiomyography (TMG) and myotonometry (MMT) devices have been developed to measure mechanical and contractile properties of skeletal muscele. The aim of this study was to explore the sensitivity of the aforementioned techniques in detecting a change in passive mechanical properties of the biceps femoris (BF) muscele as a result of change in knee joint angle (i.e. muscle length).

Objectives: To examine psychosocial and functional correlates of nutrition in a nonrandom sample of Irish community-dwelling older adults.

Objective: to classify a community sample of older people into three increasing frailty phenotypes and compare their orthostatic haemodynamics.

In our study we investigated how temporal aspects of speech such as the length and proportion of pauses or length of utterances reflect one’s cognitive state. We used the performance on the MMSE memory subscale (Folstein et al, 1975: Small et al, 2000) for validating the temporal speech features extracted from two tasks: picture description (PD) and picture taboo (PT). We integrated this data with a linguistic analysis of transcripts (Kemper et al, 2001).

It has been proposed that satisfaction with one’s sleep is more clinically relevant than objective measures of sleep parameters. Quantifying self-reports of sleep can be done using subjective scales, for instance, the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index. This measure is a validated scale which measures global satisfaction with sleep, as well as taking subjective measures of seven different domains of sleep quality, e.g. sleep latency, habitual sleep efficiency. We employed the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index within a cohort of 624 community dwelling older Irish adults, who participated in the Technology Research for Independent Living (TRIL) clinical assessment between 2007 and 2010. This project is now at a longitudinal stage. We report cross-sectional findings from baseline detailing relationships between subjective sleep quality and various biopsychosocial measures. The analyses are divided into two domains; sleep as it relates to autonomic functioning, and sleep as it relates to psychological and social factors. We found that self-reported very poor sleep is associated with delayed recovery at orthostasis, age and pain. In the psychosocial domain, we found that poor sleep is associated with neuroticism, depression, and anxiety. Loneliness related to subjective sleep quality, and perceived stress related to daytime dysfunction. Based on these analyses, it was apparent that the different aspects of sleep quality relate to different psychosocial factors. Considering the clinical relevance of self-reports of sleep quality, future research investigating the efficacy of personalised psychosocial evaluations in the diagnosis and treatment of sleep problems is investigated.

While it is known that psychosocial factors affect overall sleep quality, there is little consensus on the factors that affect different aspects of sleep. The Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) provides a means of examining these separate aspects of sleep. This study investigated whether the different components of the PSQI are affected by different psychosocial factors, or whether all aspects of sleep are associated with the same factors. Neuroticism, depression, anxiety and age accounted for overall sleep quality. Further analyses revealed that different psychosocial and health-related factors such as pain, loneliness and personality accounted for scores in the different components. Interventions for poor sleep quality may depend on the aspect of sleep affected in the individual, and treatment may be contingent on a number of different psychosocial variables.

OBJECTIVES: To identify morphological orthostatic blood pressure (BP) phenotypes in older people and assess their correlation with orthostatic intolerance (OI), falls, and frailty and to compare the discriminatory performance of a morphological classification with two established orthostatic hypotension (OH) definitions: consensus (COH) and initial (IOH).

As the Irish population ages, the potential role of information and communication technologies (ICT) to assist with community care has gained prominence, as it has in many Western nations. However, little is known about how the perceptions and preferences of older people (as current care users) and the general population (as prospective care users) are constructed for ICT within the context of existing community-care provision and orthodox person-led care programs. This paper aims to address this deficit for the Irish context and contribute to international knowledge on this topic. Data for the research comes from four case studies of community care sites, three focus-group discussions and 60 face-to-face exploratory survey interviews (based around stated-preference scenarios) with a general population sample. Care preferences were rooted in orthodox forms of person-led care provision. Perceptions of technology, experience/familiarity with technology, and difficulty conceptualizing technology and need for technology assistance, are interconnected in how they influence ICT preferences and acceptance. More dominant, however, were micro- and macro-contextual factors associated with community care, namely (1) the state of the older adult community care sector; (2) the desire for person-to-person contact; (3) the context of place.