Measuring Physical Activity in Spinal Cord Injury Using Wrist-Worn Accelerometers

People with spinal cord injuries (SCI) often have limited physical activity, and it's important to understand their activity levels to help them incorporate more movement into their daily lives. Accelerometers are devices that can measure physical activity, but it's important to know how well they work for people with SCI. This study looked at two wrist-worn accelerometers, Actiwatch Score and PRO-Diary, to see how well they measured physical activity in people with and without SCI. Participants wore both monitors while doing different tasks in a lab, like watching videos, sweeping, and walking or wheeling. The study found that both monitors were able to detect differences in activity levels between tasks and showed similar results. This suggests that either monitor could be used to study physical activity patterns in people with SCI.

• 1
  Both monitors demonstrated significantly different increasing physical activity levels with higher intensity tasks.
• 2
  Agreement was high between monitors across tasks (interclass correlation coefficients = .78–.97).
• 3
  Participants with spinal cord injury had similar activity counts within tasks compared with controls except for walking–wheeling.