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Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Tracking America's physical activity, via smartphone

June 19, 2012 By Angela Herring in HealthStephen Intille, Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science and Health Sciences "We know that most Amer­i­cans are too seden­tary," said North­eastern asso­ciate pro­fessor Stephen Intille, a founding fac­ulty member of the university's new Per­sonal Health Infor­matics grad­uate pro­gram with dual appoint­ments in the Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence and Bouvé Col­lege of Health Sci­ences. "What we need is high quality infor­ma­tion about what drives deci­sions about phys­ical activity so we can design the next gen­er­a­tion of health interventions." Toward that end, Intille has teamed up with Genevieve Dunton, an assis­tant pro­fessor of pre­ven­tive med­i­cine at the Uni­ver­sity of Southern Cal­i­fornia, to gather infor­ma­tion about where, when, why and how teenagers get their phys­ical activity. Tra­di­tional studies ask par­tic­i­pants to place an activity mon­itor on their hip, which uses an accelerom­eter to mea­sure motion. "What you get are data recording roughly how active a person is throughout the day, but you don't get any infor­ma­tion other than this motion pat­tern," Intille explained. But in order to develop informed inter­ven­tions, public health pro­fes­sionals also need to know things like where people are when they're exer­cising or seden­tary, if they're with other people and what they're doing. That's why Intille and Dunton, with the sup­port of a two-​​year, $450,000 grant from the National Insti­tutes of Health, will develop and eval­uate a mobile phone app that sup­ple­ments the activity-​​monitor data. Using the loca­tion and motion tech­nolo­gies already embedded in mobile devices, Intille's app will deter­mine appro­priate times throughout the day to ask study par­tic­i­pants about the con­texts that are influ­encing their activity. "The fun­da­mental idea is there is a rela­tion­ship between the motion of your phone and the activity that you do and the use of the activity mon­itor." The phone will rec­og­nize periods of increased or reduced phys­ical activity (for example, if you take it off while playing a high-​​impact sport or take a nap) and present ques­tions about what a par­tic­i­pant is doing during the "inter­esting" periods. "It's about cre­ating and eval­u­ating a tool that would help us aug­ment the type of infor­ma­tion that we get from stan­dard research tools so that researchers get that addi­tional con­tex­tual info about where and why teens are doing the activity," said Intille. Dunton explained that the higher quality data will allow researchers to better under­stand the rela­tion­ship between phys­ical activity, seden­tary behav­iors, and the risk of meta­bolic, car­dio­vas­cular and other chronic diseases. Intille's lab at North­eastern focuses on sensor-​​driven mobile health tech­nology. Other studies to come out of it have used a sim­ilar approach, but this is the first time the app will be pro­grammed to rec­og­nize major activity changes. "Pre­vious studies would ask ques­tions ran­domly throughout the day, but that's not a very effi­cient way to do it," Intille said. This is the first time the app will be pro­gramed to aug­ment an existing research tool by rec­og­nizing major activity changes and using a game-​​like inter­face that makes it easy for teens to fill in gaps by answering carefully-​​timed questions. He hopes that the app will pro­vide a valu­able, low-​​cost tool for future studies that also inves­ti­gate phys­ical activity patterns. "In the long term, we could poten­tially use this same type of tech­nology as an inter­ven­tion," said Intille, who explained, for example, that users would receive pos­i­tive feed­back mes­sages through the phone when the app detects that they are being phys­i­cally active. Provided by Northeastern University 

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