Measuring your kids’ activity with a smartphones

Stephen Intille, an associate professor at Northeastern University hopes to determine where and why we exercise, using a smartphone app.

Working with professors from the University of Southern California, Intille will develop a mobile app to track daily physical movement.

Unlike activity monitors that only record movement data, the app will determine and document where users are exercising by asking them to answer  questions throughout the day. When the phone is left untouched, users have to account for why they weren’t moving. Perhaps they were out playing with their kids?

“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,” said Intille.

What we need is high quality infor­ma­tion about what drives deci­sions about phys­ical activity so we can design the next gen­er­a­tion of health interventions. Full story