Physical activity is core to maintaining a healthy life style and to preventing and rehabilitating chronic diseases. Sustaining an active and healthy lifestyle in everyday routines is, however, challenging. Moreover, getting accurate insight into the level of activity of a person is technically challenging. This project has two purposes: (i) to accurately monitor physical activity during everyday life and (ii) to build and clinically verify a novel smartphone-based method for accurate estimation of energy expenditure.
Understanding weight loss behaviour
The project has subjected 130 randomised, physically inactive, overweight and obese women and men to either 6 months of habitual lifestyle, active commuting or leisure-time exercise of moderate or vigorous intensity. Amongst other things, this study showed that inactive, overweight people can lose fat mass just as effectively by riding a bike to work as by exercising in their leisure time.
Smartphones to monitor and analyse activity and energy expenditure
Participants were monitored by smartphone technology, double-labelled water, accelerometers and heart rate monitors. This data is being used to validate smartphones as a technology for monitoring and estimating energy expenditure in different domains of everyday life and determine the effectiveness of a structured exercise intervention to increase energy expenditure. Creating a smartphone-based method for accurately estimating energy expenditure and activity levels will be a significant simplification to the current laboratory- based approach of using double-marked water.
Perspectives in the design and promotion of technologies for physical motivation
The results provide insights into the behavioural response of overweight citizens to various exercise programmes and inform the design of future health promotion efforts, including technology-based solutions for physical activity monitoring.