Karim Ladha, MD
Assistant Professor, Anesthesia, University of Toronto

Peri-Operative Wearables in Elder Recovery after Surgery (POWERS) Trial

As surgical populations become older and frailer there is an urgent need to re-evaluate how patients, clinicians, researchers and administrators determine preoperative risk and assess optimal recovery after surgery. Personal wearable activity monitors are now readily available and present an important opportunity to improve perioperative care by providing a cost-effective, non-invasive means to risk stratify patients preoperatively and develop new measures of recovery/disability after surgery. Our proposal is to conduct the Peri-Operative Wearables in Elder Recovery after Surgery (POWERS) trial which will be a single arm prospective multi-center cohort study to evaluate the performance of activity monitors as measures of preoperative risk and postoperative recovery of function. The study will enroll two hundred patients who are over the age of 65 and scheduled to undergo elective major non-cardiac surgery with an anticipated length of stay of greater than two days. Each patient will receive an activity monitor for a minimum of one week prior to surgery with the goal of wearing the monitor throughout the postoperative period until ninety days after the operation. Postoperatively, all patients will complete standardized questionnaires at 7, 30 and 90 days to assess disability, quality of life and pain interference. Using advanced statistical techniques, we will define trajectories of activity and sleep in the perioperative period and their associations with postoperative disability and recovery.