PhD defence Rob van Lummel

The McRoberts team is proud to announce that its founder and CEO Rob will defend his dissertation called "Assessing Sit-to-Stand for Clinical Use" on March 30th 2017 at the Faculty of Behavioural and Movement Sciences at the VU University Amsterdam.

The thesis covers 3 main topics related to the instrumented analysis of Sit-to-Stand movements:

The ability to rise from sitting to standing is critical to an individual’s quality of life as it is a prerequisite for functional independence. The most common method to assess Sit-to-Stand (STS) performance in older adults is using a stopwatch. This results in a one-dimensional outcome, namely the time it takes to perform this test. Rob's thesis provides evidence that temporal and kinematic parameters of the STS can reliably be detected using body-fixed sensors. Furthermore, these parameters correlate higher with clinical measures than the total time of the STS does. This provides a starting point for more detailed interventions aiming to improve STS performance. However, as Part III of the thesis demonstrates, a good performance does not necessarily translate to higher levels of physical activity, which would of course be the ultimate goal.

The VU University released a press release (Dutch) about the event with more information on the implications of the study and quotes from the opponents.

The download links below provide access to (parts of) the thesis:
Complete dissertation
Cover
Title page
Table of contents
Abstract
Abstract (Dutch)