Activity Reminder & PA tracker

An app to remind you to stand up and be active during the office day.

Activity Reminder & PA tracker

An app to remind you to stand up and be active during the office day. The source code is available in github (https://github.com/tjrantal/activitymonitor)

It is well-established that physical activity and inactivity are associated with health. One of the sedentary behaviour issues associated with office-based occupations is extended bouts of sitting, which may be detrimental to your health even if you are active during your spare time. This app records the accelerations of the phone continuously and alerts you with a buzz whenever your phone has not moved for a duration of (default based on inactivity research) 30 min.

The app also records the amount of physical activity in (5 s epochs) and reports accumulated minutes spent in inactivity, light activity, and moderate-to-vigorous activity-zones for the day thus enabling you to track your physical activity whenever you're carrying your phone (the data gets also stored on your phone on the external memory card in /activityReminder [folder will be created when the app is executed] as tab separated text. Two columns, one for UNIX timestamp in your local timezone, and another for the corresponding 5 s epoch mean amplitude deviation [see Vähä-Ypyä et al. PLoS One. 2015 Aug 20;10(8):e0134813. and Vähä-Ypyä et al. Clin Physiol Funct Imaging. 2015 Jan;35(1):64-70] calculated based on resultant acceleration).

Physical activity recommendations vary between different agencies and countries but 20 min (accumulated in minimum bouts of 10 min) of moderate to vigrous activity 5 days per week targeting a minimum weekly total of 150 min seems to be close to universally agreeable (see e.g. World Health Organisation "Global recommendations on physical activity for health" for details and justification).

A caveat of the app is that some Android phones employ aggressive power savings modes that cannot be overridden by the app and thus only sample accelerations at around five times per second. The minimum number of samples per second for these purposes should be more than 20 samples per second (the mean samples per second for the most recent 5 s epoch is reported by the app as sampling rate). Also, the built-in accelerometer sensors have a limited range, and thus do not record anything more vigorous than walking accurately. Brisk walking is considered a vigorous activity and hence this limited range is not a major issue for recording minutes spent in particular activity zones.

FEATURES

Set time when the activity remind buzzer is on (Remind start and Remind stop buttons)

Turn reminder on and off (e.g. turn buzzer off for a meeting, Reminder On/Off toggle button)

Set inactivity remind duration (Every 30 min button)

Visualise activity from recorded days (Visualise Activities button)

Stays active in the background. If you do not press Shutdown Reminder button, the app stays open in the activity bar, and keeps remind, and recording physical activity (this is the intended use mode). Note, increases battery consumption as the accelerometer sensor is sampled continually.