Investigating Wrist-Based Acceleration Summary Measures across Different Sample Rates towards 24-Hour Physical Activity and Sleep Profile Assessment

Wrist-worn wearable sensors have attracted considerable research interest because of their potential in providing continuous, longitudinal, non-invasive measurements, leading to insights into Physical Activity (PA), sleep, and circadian variability. Three key practical considerations for research-grade wearables are as follows: (a) choosing an appropriate sample rate, (b) summarizing raw three-dimensional accelerometry data for further processing (accelerometry summary measures), and (c) accurately estimating PA levels and sleep towards understanding participants’ 24-hour profiles. We used the CAPTURE-24 dataset, where 148 participants concurrently wore a wrist-worn three-dimensional accelerometer and a wearable camera over approximately 24 h to obtain minute-by-minute labels: sleep; and sedentary light, moderate, and vigorous PA. We propose a new acceleration summary measure, the Rate of Change Acceleration Movement (ROCAM), and compare its performance against three established approaches summarizing three-dimensional acceleration data towards replicating the minute-by-minute labels. Moreover, we compare findings where the acceleration data was sampled at 10, 25, 50, and 100 Hz. We demonstrate the competitive advantage of ROCAM towards estimating the five labels (80.2% accuracy) and building 24-hour profiles where the sample rate of 10 Hz is fully sufficient. Collectively, these findings provide insights facilitating the deployment of large-scale longitudinal actigraphy data processing towards 24-hour PA and sleep-profile assessment.