# Occupational Therapy–Based Physical Activity Questionnaire (OTBPAQ) Categorization of Physical Activity Composition Ratios of Older Individuals Living in the Community

## TL;DR

This study uses a questionnaire to categorize physical activity patterns in older adults and finds five distinct groups based on their activity composition.

## Contribution

The study introduces a new method for categorizing physical activity composition ratios in older adults using the OTBPAQ questionnaire.

## Key findings

- Cluster analysis identified five distinct groups of older adults based on their physical activity composition ratios.
- Participant characteristics such as activity amount and category diversity varied significantly among the groups.
- The OTBPAQ enables individualized approaches to physical activity, potentially improving health outcomes for older adults.

## Abstract

This study is aimed at calculating and categorizing the composition ratios of physical activity categories in relation to total daily physical activity among older adults living in a community using the Occupational Therapy–Based Physical Activity Questionnaire (OTBPAQ) and at examining their characteristics.

The survey used the OTBPAQ to evaluate the composition of physical activity categories as well as a questionnaire on participant characteristics (sex, age, presence of family members, subjective well‐being, hobbies and activities, physical pain, frailty, and physical activity). The OTBPAQ was developed as an evaluation chart concerning the “occupation” category. Subsequently, cluster analysis was conducted based on the composition ratios of physical activity categories in relation to total daily physical activity, and the relevance of the participant characteristics was confirmed for each extracted group.

A total of 499 participants were allocated using cluster analysis into five groups, namely, “balance‐oriented group,” “aerobic exercise group,” “shopping group,” “sports group,” and “recreational gymnastics group,” based on the main activity categories of each cluster. Results showed that participant characteristics, such as the amount of physical activity and number of physical activity categories, differed among the clusters.

The OTBPAQ could extract five clusters of older adults in a community based on the composition ratio of physical activity categories. Examining the composition ratio of physical activity categories can facilitate a highly individualized approach to physical activity for each group, leading to more effective care prevention measures to increase healthy life expectancy.