Measuring Physical Activity With ActivPal

Routine physical activity can be an important indicator of health across an individual's life span. Nonetheless, the frequency of inactivity continues to be problematic for a large number of children and adolescents. Adding to that challenge, fatigue has been described as a typical symptom of neurological diseases and disorders Consumer wearables and accelerometers are becoming increasingly popular to track physical activities and monitor health and disease progression. With the increased adoption of activity trackers comes the increased generation of valuable individual-based data. Generated data has the potential to provide detailed insights into the user's behavior and lifestyle. Although methods for objectively measuring physical activity in children and adults in naturalistic settings are well established (i.e., accelerometry), they are most widely used on healthy individuals. Due to cost and technical requirements, these technologies are limited which effects their wide-scale use. Ultimately, this undermines efforts to evaluate physical activity changes and nuances among healthy and diseased populations. This is of particular interest in rare disease populations, specifically in neuromuscular diseases, where one can study a wide range of features that can be used to monitor an individual's sleep, vertical positioning, or overall physical activity. Tracking physical activity can help provide clinicians with a more accurate disease profile and help to identify possible interventions. Collection of this data could potentially provide valuable insight into an individual's daily routines, lifestyle, and behaviors.