Hourly step recommendations to achieve daily goals for working and older adults

The widespread use of physical activity trackers enables the collection of high-resolution health data, such as hourly step counts, to evaluate health promotion programmes. We aim to investigate how participants meet their daily step goals.

We used 24-h steps data from the National Steps Challenge^TM Season 3, wherein participants were rewarded with vouchers when achieving specified goals of 5000, 7500, and 10,000 steps per day. We extracted data from 3075 participants' including a total of 52,346 participant-days. We modelled the hourly step counts using a two-part model, in which the distribution for step counts was allowed to depend on the sum of step counts up to the previous hour and participant demographics.

Participants have a mean age of 44.2 years (standard deviation = 13.9), and 40.4% are males. We show that on weekdays, the hourly mean step counts among participants aged 60 and above are higher than participants aged 30 to 59 from the start of the day till 6 p.m. We also find that participants who accumulate at least 7000 steps by 7 p.m. are associated with higher success of achieving 10,000 steps.

We provide recommendations on the hourly targets to achieve daily goals, based on different participants' characteristics. Future studies could experimentally test if prompts and nudges at the recommended times of day could promote reaching step goals.