Article

The purpose of this study was to develop and test a generic technique to robustly
quantify the pattern of sedentary behaviour from objective records. The technique
was applied to four groups of subjects: a healthy group with an active occupation
(N=54), a healthy group with a sedentary occupation (N=53), a group of subjects
with chronic low back pain (N=5) and a group of subjects with chronic fatigue
syndrome (N=14). This study presents the first evidence that bouts of sedentary
activity are power law distributed. Results showed that there was no significant
difference in total sedentary time between the groups, however, the patterns of
accumulation of sedentary time were significantly different for the groups.
Sedentary groups accumulated their total sedentary time from a small number of
longer sedentary bouts. Active groups tended to break their sedentary time into a
greater number of shorter bouts. This suggests that the power law exponent alpha
and the GINI index G, used to describe the pattern of accumulation of sedentary
time, could be used to evaluate and quantify sedentary behaviour.
CI - Copyright 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Langue : ANGLAIS