Flexible R Functions for Processing Accelerometer Data, with Emphasis on NHANES 2003-2006

Accelerometers are a valuable tool for measuring physical activity (PA) in epidemiological studies. However, considerable processing is needed to convert time-series accelerometer data into meaningful variables for statistical analysis. This article describes two recently developed R packages for processing accelerometer data. The package accelerometry contains functions for performing various data processing procedures, such as identifying periods of non-wear time and bouts of activity. The functions are flexible, computationally efficient, and compatible with uniaxial or triaxial data. The package nhanesaccel is specifically for processing data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), years 2003–2006. Its primary function generates measures of PA volume, intensity, frequency, and patterns according to user-specified data processing methods. This function can process the NHANES 2003-2006 dataset in under one minute, which is a drastic improve ment over existing software. This article highlights important features of packages accelerometry and nhanesaccel and demonstrates typical usage for PA researchers.

Dane R. Van Domelen , W. Stephen Pittard
2015-01-04

CRAN packages used

accelerometry, Rcpp, pawacc, PhysicalActivity, survey, GGIR

CRAN Task Views implied by cited packages

HighPerformanceComputing, NumericalMathematics, OfficialStatistics, SocialSciences, Survival

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Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as

Domelen & Pittard, "Flexible R Functions for Processing Accelerometer Data, with Emphasis on NHANES 2003-2006", The R Journal, 2015

BibTeX citation

@article{RJ-2014-024,
  author = {Domelen, Dane R. Van and Pittard, W. Stephen},
  title = {Flexible R Functions for Processing Accelerometer Data, with Emphasis on NHANES 2003-2006},
  journal = {The R Journal},
  year = {2015},
  note = {https://doi.org/10.32614/RJ-2014-024},
  doi = {10.32614/RJ-2014-024},
  volume = {6},
  issue = {2},
  issn = {2073-4859},
  pages = {52-62}
}