Physical Activity in Pre-Ambulatory Children with Cerebral Palsy: An Exploratory Validation Study to Distinguish Active vs. Sedentary Time Using Wearable Sensors
Date
2025-02-19
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Sensors
Abstract
Wearable inertial sensor technology affords opportunities to record the physical activity of young children in their natural environments. The interpretation of these data, however, requires validation. The purpose of this study was to develop and establish the criterion validity of a method of quantifying active and sedentary physical activity using an inertial sensor for pre-ambulatory children with cerebral palsy. Ten participants were video recorded during 30 min physical therapy sessions that encouraged gross motor play activities, and the video recording was behaviorally coded to identify active and sedentary time. A receiver operating characteristic curve identified the optimal threshold to maximize true positive and minimize false positive active time for eight participants in the development dataset. The threshold was 0.417 m/s2 and was then validated with the remaining two participants; the percent of true positives and true negatives was 92.2 and 89.7%, respectively. We conclude that there is potential for raw sensor data to be used to quantify active and sedentary time in pre-ambulatory children with physical disability, and raw acceleration data may be more generalizable than the sensor-specific activity counts commonly reported in the literature.
Description
This article was originally published in Sensors. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/s25041261.
© 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Keywords
wearable sensors, activity cut-points, activity monitoring, motion sensors, accelerometry, actigraphy, sedentary, active, cerebral palsy
Citation
Orlando, Julie M., Beth A. Smith, Jocelyn F. Hafer, Athylia Paremski, Matthew Amodeo, Michele A. Lobo, and Laura A. Prosser. 2025. "Physical Activity in Pre-Ambulatory Children with Cerebral Palsy: An Exploratory Validation Study to Distinguish Active vs. Sedentary Time Using Wearable Sensors" Sensors 25, no. 4: 1261. https://doi.org/10.3390/s25041261