Healthy kidneys are essential for keeping people alive as they filter out toxins and excess fluids. If someone’s kidneys fail completely, then they require either a new kidney (a transplant) or for their blood to be filtered (dialysis).

Measuring physical activity in patients with renal disease at home could potentially personalise the care given to patients with kidney disease. We have started measuring physical function and activity levels of patients with kidney failure, who either already require dialysis or may need dialysis in the near future. This includes measuring how strong their hand grip is, assessing their walking speed and asking questions about how difficult they find certain activities. In the future, we think this additional information will allow us to target treatments to help improve functional ability and potentially identify any problems earlier.

However, these measurements are time-consuming and require the patient clinic visits to the hospital to be longer. Not all patients need to have these measurements taken regularly if they have good physical function. For this reason, we would like to assess levels of physical activity at home and from this measurement identify patients who need to have physical function tests in the hospital.

Following the successful completion of a feasibility study, we asked patients to wear a wrist-worn activity monitor (called an accelerometer) at home for 7 days doing their usual activities and repeat this 6 months later. We asked 100 patients to take part and compare the accelerometer measurements against the physical function tests made in the clinic to see if we can identify patients with poorer function and if changes in activity levels relates to changes in physical function tests.

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Publications

W-Ward study publications on the MRC Epidemiology Unit publications database.