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Updated: Aug 5, 2025

Methodology for Establishing a Community-Wide Life Laboratory for Capturing Unobtrusive and Continuous Remote Activity and Health Data
Published on: July 27, 2018
Association between passively collected walking and bicycling data and purposefully collected active commuting survey
Graycie W Soto1, Bryant J Webber2, Kelly Fletcher3
1Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 4770 Buford Hwy, Atlanta, GA, 30341, USA; Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) Research Participation Program, Oak Ridge, TN, 37831, USA.
Abstract:
Commercially-available location-based services (LBS) data derived primarily from mobile devices may provide an alternative to surveys for monitoring physically-active transportation. Using Spearman correlation, we compared county-level metrics of walking and bicycling from StreetLight with metrics of physically-active commuting among U.S. workers from the American Community Survey. Our strongest pair of metrics ranked counties (n = 298) similarly for walking (rho = 0.53 [95% CI: 0.44-0.61]) and bicycling (rho = 0.61 [0.53-0.67]). Correlations were higher for denser and more urban counties. LBS data may offer public health and transportation professionals timely information on walking and bicycling behavior at finer geographic scales than some existing surveys.
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