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Validation of the Fitbit Zip for monitoring physical activity among free-living adolescents

BACKGROUND: The widespread availability of affordable consumer-oriented devices for monitoring physical activity offers an appealing option to physical activity researchers, but studies are needed to demonstrate the validity and reliability of these products. To examine the validity of the Fitbit Zi...

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Autores principales: Schneider, Margaret, Chau, Larissa
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5031304/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27655477
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13104-016-2253-6
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author Schneider, Margaret
Chau, Larissa
author_facet Schneider, Margaret
Chau, Larissa
author_sort Schneider, Margaret
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: The widespread availability of affordable consumer-oriented devices for monitoring physical activity offers an appealing option to physical activity researchers, but studies are needed to demonstrate the validity and reliability of these products. To examine the validity of the Fitbit Zip, we recruited three cohorts (N’s = 25, 35, and 27) of middle-school students to wear the Fitbit and the ActiGraph simultaneously for a week. Adolescents were healthy volunteers representing a range of activity levels. Mean daily minutes of MVPA and mean steps per day were compared between the Fitbit Zip and the Actigraph. RESULTS: The step data for the Fitbit Zip correlated highly with the step data yielded by the ActiGraph (r’s = .72, .92, .96), and the MVPA data for the Fitbit Zip correlated highly with the MVPA data from the ActiGraph (r’s = .67, .79, .94). Bland–Altman plots revealed that the Fitbit Zip overestimated activity in comparison to the ActiGraph, especially for Cohort One, which completed the study before Fitbit modified their algorithms to count as activity only bouts that continued for at least 10 min. CONCLUSIONS: Our data suggest that the Fitbit Zip is a reasonable alternative to the ActiGraph for estimating activity among free-living adolescents. However, data from the Fitbit should not be used interchangeably with data from the ActiGraph, as there is a consistent tendency for the Fitbit to overestimate steps in comparison to the ActiGraph. Also, the findings confirm concern about using for research a consumer-oriented device that does not make public their algorithms.
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spelling pubmed-50313042016-09-29 Validation of the Fitbit Zip for monitoring physical activity among free-living adolescents Schneider, Margaret Chau, Larissa BMC Res Notes Research Article BACKGROUND: The widespread availability of affordable consumer-oriented devices for monitoring physical activity offers an appealing option to physical activity researchers, but studies are needed to demonstrate the validity and reliability of these products. To examine the validity of the Fitbit Zip, we recruited three cohorts (N’s = 25, 35, and 27) of middle-school students to wear the Fitbit and the ActiGraph simultaneously for a week. Adolescents were healthy volunteers representing a range of activity levels. Mean daily minutes of MVPA and mean steps per day were compared between the Fitbit Zip and the Actigraph. RESULTS: The step data for the Fitbit Zip correlated highly with the step data yielded by the ActiGraph (r’s = .72, .92, .96), and the MVPA data for the Fitbit Zip correlated highly with the MVPA data from the ActiGraph (r’s = .67, .79, .94). Bland–Altman plots revealed that the Fitbit Zip overestimated activity in comparison to the ActiGraph, especially for Cohort One, which completed the study before Fitbit modified their algorithms to count as activity only bouts that continued for at least 10 min. CONCLUSIONS: Our data suggest that the Fitbit Zip is a reasonable alternative to the ActiGraph for estimating activity among free-living adolescents. However, data from the Fitbit should not be used interchangeably with data from the ActiGraph, as there is a consistent tendency for the Fitbit to overestimate steps in comparison to the ActiGraph. Also, the findings confirm concern about using for research a consumer-oriented device that does not make public their algorithms. BioMed Central 2016-09-21 /pmc/articles/PMC5031304/ /pubmed/27655477 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13104-016-2253-6 Text en © The Author(s) 2016 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Research Article
Schneider, Margaret
Chau, Larissa
Validation of the Fitbit Zip for monitoring physical activity among free-living adolescents
title Validation of the Fitbit Zip for monitoring physical activity among free-living adolescents
title_full Validation of the Fitbit Zip for monitoring physical activity among free-living adolescents
title_fullStr Validation of the Fitbit Zip for monitoring physical activity among free-living adolescents
title_full_unstemmed Validation of the Fitbit Zip for monitoring physical activity among free-living adolescents
title_short Validation of the Fitbit Zip for monitoring physical activity among free-living adolescents
title_sort validation of the fitbit zip for monitoring physical activity among free-living adolescents
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5031304/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27655477
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13104-016-2253-6
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