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BACKGROUND The increasing prevalence of physical inactivity and insufficient sleep in adolescents likely contributes to worsening cardiometabolic and mental health. However, obtaining accurate behavioral measures is a challenge. Consumer wearable devices offer a user-friendly method to assess physical activity and sleep duration. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to describe the process and the preliminary results of physical activity and sleep behavior data collected using a consumer wearable Fitbit device in an adolescent cohort. METHODS We provided Fitbit Charge 2TM or Charge 3TM wrist-worn activity monitors to adolescent participants in Project Viva, a Boston-MA area cohort, from 2017 to 2022. We invited participants to wear the devices for ≥7 days for 24 hours a day to measure their physical activity, heart rate, and sleep and, allowed them to keep the device as a participation incentive. RESULTS We collected over 7 million minutes of physical activity, heart rate, and sleep data from 677 participants, 53% female. The average (standard deviation, SD) age of participants was 17.7 years (0.7). The racial and ethnic composition was 65% non-Hispanic White, 14% non-Hispanic Black, 10% Hispanic, 3.2% non-Hispanic Asian, and 7.8% of other races. Participants demonstrated high adherence to research protocol, with the mean (SD) wear duration of 7.5 days (1.1), and 90% of participants (n=612) had five or more days wearing the device >600 minutes/day. The mean (SD) steps were 8,883 (3,455) steps/day and the mean (SD) awake sedentary time were 564 (138) minutes/day. Over 87% (n=588) of participants had sleep data available for five or more days, among whom average nightly sleep duration was 7.9 hours (SD: 0.9). CONCLUSIONS In a cohort of US adolescents, we obtained high rates of compliance with using a consumer wearable device to measure physical activity and sleep.
Zhang et al. (Wed,) studied this question.