Wavelet-Based Analysis of Physical Activity and Sleep Movement Data from Wearable Sensors among Obese Adults

Decreased physical activity in obese individuals is associated with a prevalence of cardiovascular and metabolic disorders. Physicians usually recommend that obese individuals change their lifestyle, specifically changes in diet, exercise, and other physical activities for obesity management. Therefore, understanding physical activity and sleep behavior is an essential aspect of obesity management. With innovations in mobile and electronic health care technologies, wearable inertial sensors have been used extensively over the past decade for monitoring human activities. Despite significant progress with the wearable inertial sensing technology, there is a knowledge gap among researchers regarding how to analyze longitudinal multi-day inertial sensor data to explore activities of daily living (ADL) and sleep behavior. The purpose of this study was to explore new clinically relevant metrics using movement amplitude and frequency from longitudinal wearable sensor data in obese and non-obese young adults. We utilized wavelet analysis to determine movement frequencies on longitudinal multi-day wearable sensor data. In this study, we recruited 10 obese and 10 non-obese young subjects. We found that obese participants performed more low-frequency (0.1 Hz) movements and fewer movements of high frequency (1.1–1.4 Hz) compared to non-obese counterparts. Both obese and non-obese subjects were active during the 00:00–06:00 time interval. In addition, obesity affected sleep with significantly fewer transitions, and obese individuals showed low values of root mean square transition accelerations throughout the night. This study is critical for obesity management to prevent unhealthy weight gain by the recommendations of physical activity based on our results. Longitudinal multi-day monitoring using wearable sensors has great potential to be integrated into routine health care checkups to prevent obesity and promote physical activities.