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Updated: Apr 28, 2026

Visualization of Intensity Levels to Reduce the Gap Between Self-Reported and Directly Measured Physical Activity
Published on: March 7, 2019
Waist-Worn Actigraphy: Population-Referenced Percentiles for Total Activity Counts in U.S. Adults
Dana L Wolff-Hughes1, Eugene C Fitzhugh, David R Bassett
1Dept of Kinesiology, Recreation, and Sports Studies, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN.
Background:
Accelerometer-derived total activity count is a measure of total physical activity (PA) volume. The purpose of this study was to develop age- and gender-specific percentiles for daily total activity counts (TAC), minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA), and minutes of light physical activity (LPA) in U.S. adults.
Methods:
Waist-worn accelerometer data from the 2003-2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey were used for this analysis. The sample included adults ≥ 20 years with ≥ 10 hours accelerometer wear time on ≥ 4 days (N = 6093). MVPA and LPA were defined as the number of 1-minute epochs with counts ≥ 2020 and 100 to 2019, respectively. TAC represented the activity counts acquired daily. TAC, MVPA, and LPA were averaged across valid days to produce a daily mean.
Results:
Males in the 50th percentile accumulated 288 140 TAC/day, with 357 and 22 minutes/day spent in LPA and MVPA, respectively. The median for females was 235 741 TAC/ day, with 349 and 12 minutes/day spent in LPA and MVPA, respectively.
Conclusions:
Population-referenced TAC percentiles reflect the total volume of PA, expressed relative to other adults. This is a different approach to accelerometer data reduction that complements the current method of looking at time spent in intensity subcategories.
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