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Updated: Jul 16, 2026

Evaluation of a Smartphone-based Human Activity Recognition System in a Daily Living Environment
Published on: December 11, 2015
Mobgap: A State-of-the-Art Python Framework for Reproducible Estimation and Algorithm Validation of Digital Mobility
Cameron Kirk1, Arne Kuederle2, Paolo Tasca3
1Translational and Clinical Research Institute, Faculty of Medical Sciences, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne NE4 5PL, UK.
Abstract:
Objective, continuous assessment of real-world mobility using wearables has significant potential to transform clinical research and practice, yet the field lacks standardised, open-source tools that enable reproducible algorithm real-world validation, across multiple clinical cohorts. This would improve transparency around definitions and performance, thereby enhancing interpretation and more meaningful comparison across studies. The Mobilise-D consortium validated a comprehensive analytical pipeline for estimating digital mobility outcomes from wearables, originally implemented in a combination of MATLAB, R, and Python codes. To overcome the licencing, reproducibility, and accessibility limitations of this implementation, the pipeline has been re-implemented and re-validated, against gold standards, as the open-source mobgap Python package. Here, we describe the mobgap ecosystem, detail how algorithms can be integrated and benchmarked in a reproducible way and present a re-validation of the pipeline against reference data across six clinical cohorts under real-world conditions. Validation results showed that across all cohorts, walking speed was estimated with an absolute error of 0.10 m/s and an intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) of 0.81, demonstrating comparable or superior performance to the original implementation. Mobgap (v1.2) is openly available and is intended to serve as a reproducible reference implementation and benchmarking platform for researchers developing or validating mobility analysis algorithms using wearable data.
