Rob Marcotte, a doctoral student in the department of kinesiology, received the "Best Student Oral Presentation" award at the 2019 International Conference on Ambulatory Monitoring of Physical Activity and Movement (ICAMPAM), held June 26-28, 2019 in Maastricht, The Netherlands. Sponsored by the International Society for the Measurement of Physical Behaviour, ICAMPAM is multidisciplinary in focus, bringing together people from a wide variety of backgrounds and expertise, including researchers, clinicians, therapists, signal analysts, computational scientists and commercial companies, to promote and facilitate the study and applications of objective physical activity measurement.
"It was definitely an unexpected honor since I had attended many other sessions and saw a lot of great presentations from very qualified students," says Marcotte, a member of the physical activity and health lab led by associate professor of kinesiology John Sirard.
Marcotte delivered a talk titled "Comparison of Free-living Activity Classification Between Sojourns and Epochs using a Wrist-worn Accelerometer." In his presentation, he discussed his lab’s research comparing activity classification (i.e., walking, sitting, standing, bicycling, dynamic activity) accuracy among various time window lengths using a wrist-worn activity monitor. Despite speculation that the use of time-varying windows, also known as sojourns, may improve activity classification, Marcotte’s results showed that overall classification accuracy was worse using sojourns with many of the misclassifications occurring between ambulatory and standing behaviors.
“This presentation was the result of an evolving collaborative effort,” notes Marcotte. “My advisors, labmates and stellar undergraduate research assistants have worked hard over the past few years to collect the data, develop and refine our direct observation system which we use as our criterion measure, and annotate the videos so that we can conduct analyses such as what I was able to present at ICAMPAM.”
Marcotte’s research was funded through NIH R01DK110148: Novel Accelerometer Calibration and Validation in Children and Adolescents led by principal investigators Sirard and John Staudenmayer, a professor in the department of mathematics and statistics.