A concept for personal wellness management based on activity monitoring

Lifestyle related health problems are increasing rapidly. Many of them could be prevented or alleviated by sufficient physical activity, enough sleep, and a balanced diet. Individual citizens have the main responsibility for their own health and wellness management in their daily lives. Motivational tools based on modern technologies can support people in this task. Vivago Personal Wellness Manager (PWM) is a concept for personal wellness management, based on continuous activity monitoring with a wrist-worn device combined with immediate feedback on daily activity, e.g., sleep and physical activity. The concept allows long-term monitoring of activity patterns and includes PC software for detailed analysis of long-term data. We studied the ability of PWM to detect different levels of activity and to estimate energy expenditure. The classification accuracy of our method was 85.4% (SD: 6.3, range: 71.8-94.4%). The mean absolute error of the energy expenditure estimate was 8.7% (SD: 8.0, range: 1.2-32.1%). (23 refs.