Objective measurement of sedentary behaviour using accelerometers

Sedentary behaviour (SB) is an important risk factor for a number of chronic diseases. Although gaps remain in our knowledge of the elements of SB most associated with reduced health outcomes, measuring SB is important, especially in less active patient populations where treatment-related changes may be seen first in changes in SB.

We review current published work in the measurement of SB to make recommendations for SB measurement in clinical studies.

To help move our understanding of the area forward, we propose a set of derived measures of SB that can be easily understood and interpreted.

Although there is more work required to determine and validate the most clinically relevant and sensitive measures of SB, there is enough understanding of how to measure SB to enable its inclusion in study protocols.