Funding: The project is part of the CACHET project granted by TrygFonden
Project management: Bente Merete Stallknecht (KU), Jakob Eg Larsen
PhD student in the project: Simon Due Kamronn
Duration: Primo 2015-ultimo 2018
Summary
Sustaining healthy lifestyle in everyday routines has proven particular challenging. This project uses smartphones as personalized lifestyle devices to monitor, motivate, and maintain physical activity in overweight individuals.
Background
In most lifestyle-based interventions, a beneficial health effect is observed while the intervention is ongoing. However, in the transition from exercise intervention to everyday routine, outcomes regarding the maintenance of physical activity are often disappointing. This project utilizes smartphones as personalized lifestyle devices to monitor, motivate, and maintain physical activity in overweight individuals. Researchers with medical, technological, and social sciences expertise collaborate closely in an interdisciplinary research environment to study existing and develop new smartphone applications to provide valid assessments of physical activity, behavior, and biofeedback concerning physical activity. The aim is to improve the understanding of the transition from exercise intervention to everyday routine in order to promote maintenance of an active lifestyle in overweight individuals.
Project Objectives
Seventy percent of the Danish adult population owns a smartphone, which via its built-in GPS, wireless technology, and accelerometer can be used to monitor physical activity level. In this project, we will examine the ability of smartphones to precisely monitor energy expenditure in different domains of everyday life. Such measurements would enable us to determine the domain-specific compensation for an increase in physical activity in one domain (i.e., leisure or transportation); in other words, if an increase in exercise energy expenditure in one domain is absorbed in another domain. In this project, the smartphone-technology results obtained will be directly compared to measurements of energy expenditure by indirect calorimetry and doubly-labeled water in selected participants from the GO-ACTIWE project.