Physical Activity Monitoring

This entry describes the assessment of physical behavior in everyday life, an important subdomain of behavior. Ambulatory activity monitoring can compensate some shortcomings of self-report methods and is applicable to various research questions in clinical and health psychology. Due to technological developments, activity monitors based on accelerometry have become most popular to assess physical activity and contribute to advanced knowledge in epidemiological research. Besides research questions addressing a between-subject perspective, ambulatory activity monitoring enables investigating the within-subject perspective, for example, the relationship between physical behavior and affect. When planning and conducting accelerometer studies, technical specifications of the sensors, measurement principles, the target group's activity characteristics, the number of measurement days, data processing, influencing factors, and quality criteria should be taken into account. In the future, interactive multimodal ambulatory monitoring will contribute to explaining physical behavior in everyday life, as more episodes of the rare behavior of interest can be captured.