Abstract
Physical inactivity and sedentary behaviors are on the rise worldwide and contribute to the current overweight and obesity scourge. The loss of healthy life style benchmarks and the lack of the need to move make it necessary to provide feedback about physical and sedentary activities in order to promote active ways of life. The aim of this study was to develop a specific function adapted to overweight and obese people to identify four physical activity (PA) categories and to estimate the associated total energy expenditure (TEE). This function used accelerometry data collected from a smartphone to evaluate activity intensity and length, and TEE. The performance of the proposed function was estimated according to two references (Armband® and FitmatePro®) under controlled conditions (CC) for a 1.5-h scenario, and to the Armband® device in free-living conditions (FLC) over a 12-h monitoring period. The experiments were carried out with overweight and obese volunteers: 13 in CC and 27 in FLC. The evaluation differences in time spent in each category were lower than 7% in CC and 6% in FLC, in comparison to the Armband® and FitmatePro® references. The TEE mean gap in absolute value between the function and the two references was 9.3% and 11.5% in CC, and 8.5% according to Armband® in FLC.
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Special thanks to the volunteers for their participation in this study and to Gail Wagman for correcting the English.
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This study was funded by almerys (grant: research collaboration n° 101,923–581).
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INRA has received a research grant from almerys. The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Mobile & Wireless Health
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Rousset, S., Guidoux, R., Paris, L. et al. A Novel Smartphone Accelerometer Application for Low-Intensity Activity and Energy Expenditure Estimations in Overweight and Obese Adults. J Med Syst 41, 117 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-017-0763-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-017-0763-y