Research to Crack the ‘Balancing Act’ of Living Well with Knee Osteoarthritis

Getting the right balance of activities (sleep, sedentary time, and physical activity) throughout a day is important for our overall health and wellbeing. This is especially true for people with knee osteoarthritis. It’s hard to know how much sleep, exercise, and rest to do during a day to improve your knee symptoms, as the best mix of activities is different for everyone. Adding to the difficulty is the fact that there are only 24 hours in a day, so doing more of one activity means missing out on something else. Activity trade-offs are complicated to get right and may have unintended consequences. For example, could waking up early to squeeze in more exercise at the expense of sleep inadvertently increase knee osteoarthritis pain? Or, if you already work at a physical demanding job, should you prioritise rest over more exercise when you are at home? Not knowing the answers to these questions means that it is hard for people with knee osteoarthritis to know what to do, and hard for clinicians to offer the best recommendations to their patients.

To answer these questions, we used a large dataset, which included over 12,000 people with knee osteoarthritis, to determine what balance of activities is best for each person with knee osteoarthritis, based on their unique profile (e.g., age, health status, current activity levels). We then built a web-app that allows people living with knee osteoarthritis and clinicians to view personalized recommendations for the best mix of activities to reduce knee pain. The app is interactive and allows user to explore the potential impact of small, realistic, changes in their daily activities, on knee osteoarthritis pain.