Activity Monitoring System

RRD has applied the expertise of Simone Boerema in the field of measuring physical activity with wearable sensors, to further exploring objective and enriched with subjective measures of physical activity for a deeper understanding of mobility and its applicability as a tool for designers, both in the requirements and evaluation phase (pre-post studies). In this, RRD started with explorative studies on physical activity, mobility and validated questionnaires on physical activity, both independent and in joint research with TU/e and UT. These studies led to various contributions to conferences, resulting in interesting discussions with peers, leading to two developments in the work of RRD. On the one hand the shift from ‘sufficient physical activity’ to ‘reducing sedentary behaviour’ being the new smoking, and with this shift came the need to understand its definitions, implications for wearable sensor systems, and implications for personal feedback strategies. One the other hand, there was a need for richer information of the daily living experiences, which was not possible to collect with questionnaires based on recall. This is further described in the paragraph on the development of innovative monitoring methods.
RRD proceeded with new sensor calibration and validation studies to discriminate sitting from other behaviours. And bringing in the expert knowledge of RRD researcher Thijs Tönis, for his extensive data analysis skills. And complementary to that RRD is writing a literature study on measures of patterns of sedentary behaviour, to quantify the accumulation of sitting periods throughout the day, use these measures to discriminate populations based on their behaviour pattern in daily living, and to be used as a measure for personal feedback.
Developing innovative monitoring methods
RRD has created several iterations of the physical activity monitoring system, consisting of a wearable sensor and a smartphone with dedicated App and an online database. First this was enriched by adding an ESM (experience sampling methods) tool to the App. Experience sampling – asking about someone’s feelings or activities at the right moment during daily living – started with a ‘simple mobility device’ questionnaire on the smartphone on which elderly users indicated their means of transport (in cooperation with UT in the Friesland testbed). And RRD recently evolved this ESM tool to a research & design tool for capturing work activities of older employees to design an ICT Platform for ergonomic and motivating age-friendly workplaces. Currently the ESM tool captures self-reported workday satisfaction, and for each reported work task, the type of task and the effort, energy, fun and feeling for the task. And correlations between these measures can serve as strategic user insights for design for older office workers. Both the insights as well as the ESM tool can be adapted to sedentary elderly at home.
Also, RRD has explored with GbM partners the added value of objective monitoring of behaviour by providing sensor tools to studies with UT and TU/e. And although the ‘measuring’ approach was very new to design research, the project partners were enthousiastic about its potential added value. However, the data analysis tools for ESM and sedentary behaviour were at that moment not yet sufficiently developed to be easily used and adopted by the designers, being time consuming and requiring extensive data analysis skills.

Activity Monitoring System 
Keeping elderly socially connected and involved, requires them to remain mobile. However, there is little knowledge on the physical activity patterns of elderly. We explored physical activity patterns of elderly by providing them the Activity Monitoring System consisting of a wearable activity sensor and a smartphone. The gathered activity patterns were analyzed on both intensity and duration parameters and compared to other sedentary populations such as office workers. The characterizations extracted from the sensor data allows for detection of physical behaviour changes over time. And provides the measures for objective evaluation of effects of innovative mobility solutions on physical behaviour, as opposed to (validated) questionnaires which are sensitive to response bias.