Mining Sensor Data to Assess Changes in Physical Activity Behaviors in Health Interventions: Systematic Review

BACKGROUND: Sensors are increasingly used in health interventions to unobtrusively and continuously capture participants’ physical activity in free-living conditions. The rich granularity of sensor data offers great potential for analyzing patterns and changes in physical activity behaviors. The use of specialized machine learning and data mining techniques to detect, extract, and analyze these patterns has increased, helping to better understand how participants’ physical activity evolves. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this systematic review was to identify and present the various data mining techniques employed to analyze changes in physical activity behaviors from sensors-derived data in health education and health promotion intervention studies. We addressed two main research questions: (1) What are the current techniques used for mining physical activity sensor data to detect behavior changes in health education or health promotion contexts? (2) What are the challenges and opportunities in mining physical activity sensor data for detecting physical activity behavior changes? METHODS: The systematic review was performed in May 2021 using the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines. We queried the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), IEEE Xplore, ProQuest, Scopus, Web of Science, Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), and Springer literature databases for peer-reviewed references related to wearable machine learning to detect physical activity changes in health education. A total of 4388 references were initially retrieved from the databases. After removing duplicates and screening titles and abstracts, 285 references were subjected to full-text review, resulting in 19 articles included for analysis. RESULTS: All studies used accelerometers, sometimes in combination with another sensor (37%). Data were collected over a period ranging from 4 days to 1 year (median 10 weeks) from a cohort size ranging between 10 and 11615 (median 74). Data preprocessing was mainly carried out using proprietary software, generally resulting in step counts and time spent in physical activity aggregated predominantly at the daily or minute level. The main features used as input for the data mining models were descriptive statistics of the preprocessed data. The most common data mining methods were classifiers, clusters, and decision-making algorithms, and these focused on personalization (58%) and analysis of physical activity behaviors (42%). CONCLUSIONS: Mining sensor data offers great opportunities to analyze physical activity behavior changes, build models to better detect and interpret behavior changes, and allow for personalized feedback and support for participants, especially where larger sample sizes and longer recording times are available. Exploring different data aggregation levels can help detect subtle and sustained behavior changes. However, the literature suggests that there is still work remaining to improve the transparency, explicitness, and standardization of the data preprocessing and mining processes to establish best practices and make the detection methods easier to understand, scrutinize, and reproduce.