CPAH City to Surf Equipment Test 2006

The Plan

Compare the number of steps registered by traditional pedometers and accelerometers.

The People

Twenty-five staff and students from the Faculty of Medicine that walked the City to Surf.

The Test

Participants simultaneously wore a pedometer (Yamax Digi-Walker SW-700) and an accelerometer (Actigraph GT1M) on the hip during the City to Surf walk. Their start and finish time as well as the number of steps they took during the race were registered.

The number of steps measured by the pedometer was comparable to the number measured by the accelerometer (figure 2). The accelerometer recorded a higher number of steps in 20 of the 23 cases. The average difference was 4.4% and the intraclass correlation coefficient was 0.89.

What did we learn?

• It was a beautiful day to walk the City to Surf.
• The accelerometers did as well as the traditional pedometers in measuring steps during walking at a moderate to brisk pace.

Thank you!

A big thank you to all our colleagues who were willing to join the test as participants. And special thanks to Helen Kapnopulos, Josephine Chau, Klaus Gebel and Louise Freckelton for helping out.