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Loveday et al. 2015.pdf (2.7 MB)

Technologies that assess the location of physical activity and sedentary behavior: a systematic review

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posted on 2015-11-27, 13:55 authored by Adam Loveday, Lauren SherarLauren Sherar, James SandersJames Sanders, Paul SandersonPaul Sanderson, Dale EsligerDale Esliger
Background: The location in which physical activity and sedentary behavior are performed can provide valuable behavioral information, both in isolation and synergistically with other areas of physical activity and sedentary behavior research. Global positioning systems (GPS) have been used in physical activity research to identify outdoor location; however, while GPS can receive signals in certain indoor environments, it is not able to provide room- or subroom-level location. On average, adults spend a high proportion of their time indoors. A measure of indoor location would, therefore, provide valuable behavioral information. Objective: This systematic review sought to identify and critique technology which has been or could be used to assess the location of physical activity and sedentary behavior. Methods: To identify published research papers, four electronic databases were searched using key terms built around behavior, technology, and location. To be eligible for inclusion, papers were required to be published in English and describe a wearable or portable technology or device capable of measuring location. Searches were performed up to February 4, 2015. This was supplemented by backward and forward reference searching. In an attempt to include novel devices which may not yet have made their way into the published research, searches were also performed using three Internet search engines. Specialized software was used to download search results and thus mitigate the potential pitfalls of changing search algorithms. Results: A total of 188 research papers met the inclusion criteria. Global positioning systems were the most widely used location technology in the published research, followed by wearable cameras, and radio-frequency identification. Internet search engines identified 81 global positioning systems, 35 real-time locating systems, and 21 wearable cameras. Real-time locating systems determine the indoor location of a wearable tag via the known location of reference nodes. Although the type of reference node and location determination method varies between manufacturers, Wi-Fi appears to be the most popular method. Conclusions: The addition of location information to existing measures of physical activity and sedentary behavior will provide important behavioral information.

Funding

The work in this paper is part of the research portfolio supported by the National Institute for Health Research Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care—East Midlands (NIHR CLAHRC for EM).

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

JOURNAL OF MEDICAL INTERNET RESEARCH

Volume

17

Issue

8

Pages

? - ? (28)

Citation

LOVEDAY, A. ... et al, 2015. Technologies that assess the location of physical activity and sedentary behavior: a systematic review. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 17 (8), e192.

Publisher

JMIR Publications / © The Authors

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Unported (CC BY 2.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Publication date

2015

Notes

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on http://www.jmir.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included.

ISSN

1438-8871

Language

  • en

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