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The importance of nuance in statements about methods for human energy expenditure estimation that use motion sensors

European Journal of Clinical Nutrition volume 71, pages 1136–1137 (2017)Cite this article

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Sardinha and Júdice1 recently reviewed the important topic of human energy expenditure estimation from motion sensors. The manuscript is a comparison of methods and their validity, stratified by accelerometer brand, age group, and whether additional predictors are used or not. I would like to compliment the authors for attempting to review this heterogeneous field of research, where data and software are rarely made open access, and various studies use sensors or software generations that have been replaced by newer versions, which complicates making statements about present day technology. Unfortunately, the data used to generate the six figures is not supported by citations to the original publications on which the data points are based. I am sure that an acknowledgment of the original work would have been appreciated.

A decade ago when accelerometers only recorded an aggregated measure of acceleration, called ‘counts’, the choice of accelerometer brand defined which analytical method you could use and with whom you could compare your results. With the introduction of raw data collection it has become possible to generate similar estimates of physical activity with different accelerometer brands2 or explore substantially different analytical approaches within the same accelerometer brand.3

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References

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  1. Netherlands eScience Center, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    V T van Hees

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  1. V T van Hees
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Correspondence to V T van Hees.

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van Hees, V. The importance of nuance in statements about methods for human energy expenditure estimation that use motion sensors. Eur J Clin Nutr 71, 1136–1137 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/ejcn.2017.65

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