Physical inactivity: results from a pilot study with Mexican youth using mobile accelerometry
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Bioengineering, Bioinformatics, Anatomy and Physiology, Global Health, Science and Medical Education
- Keywords
- Physical inactivity, Mobile accelerometry, Obesity
- Copyright
- © 2015 Saldívar et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2015. Physical inactivity: results from a pilot study with Mexican youth using mobile accelerometry. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e937v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.937v1
Abstract
The obesity epidemic is a worldwide problem. Studies from the late 20th century show a consistent trend of increasing obesity prevalence on a global scale (Popkin & Doak, 1998). The OECD reports that overweight and obese people are now a majority amongst OECD countries, with Mexico having one of the highest obesity rates: as of 2012, 32.4% of the adult population was obese (Wilson, Devaux, & Cecchini, 2014). Obesity, in turn, is a risk factor to many of the most widespread chronic diseases: diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and even cancer. We propose that a preventive strategy towards obesity will result in long-term and high impact results. Our strategy focuses on changing two significant lifestyle factors: diet and physical activity. The former is achieved by a comprehensive health education and habit-forming program; the latter, by personalized goal setting based on activity measurements with the use of mobile accelerometry. This work presents the physical activity results of a pilot study realized with Mexican youth. Within this study, we explore the use of the motivational package “Move-your-health®” alongside a series of workshops to validate the hypothesis that personalized goal setting leads to a measurable increase in physical activity.
Author Comment
Even though the results show low levels of physical activity, their interpretation is not trivial, for there are two important factors that need be considered. First, some volunteers claimed that they participate in daily sports and that their activity measurements seemed too low. Second, the data extraction process suffered from technical malfunctions, being a potential source of measurement error. Beyond the measurement results, we have shown the feasibility of conducting a local interventional study in a youth population, demonstrating the usability of mobile accelerometry for activity measurements. This preprint is part of the PeerJ “Human Motion Project” collection (The 2nd Winter Symposium of the Human Motion Project).