Purpose: This study aimed to determine the validity of existing methods to estimate sedentary behavior (SB) under free-living conditions using ActiGraph GT3X+ accelerometers (AG).
Methods: Forty-eight young (18-25 yr) adults wore an AG on the right hip and nondominant wrist and were video recorded during four 1-h sessions in free-living settings (home, community, school, and exercise). Direct observation videos were coded for postural orientation, activity type (e.g., walking), and METs derived from the Compendium of Physical Activities, which served as the criterion measure of SB (sitting or lying posture, <1.5 METs). Thirteen methods using cut points from vertical counts per minute (CPM), counts per 15-s (CP15s), and vector magnitude (VM) counts (e.g., CPM1853VM), raw acceleration and arm angle (sedentary sphere), Euclidean norm minus one (ENMO) corrected for gravity (mg) thresholds, uni- or triaxial sojourn hybrid machine learning models (Soj1x and Soj3x), random forest (RF), and decision tree (TR) models were used to estimate SB minutes from AG data. Method bias, mean absolute percent error, and their 95% confidence intervals were estimated using repeated-measures linear mixed models.
Results: On average, participants spent 34.1 min per session in SB. CPM100, CPM150, Soj1x, and Soj3x were the only methods to accurately estimate SB from the hip. Sedentary sphere and ENMO44.8 overestimated SB by 3.9 and 6.1 min, respectively, whereas the remaining wrist methods underestimated SB (range, 9.5-2.5 min). In general, mean absolute percent error was lower using hip methods compared with wrist methods.
Conclusion: Accurate group-level estimates of SB from a hip-worn AG can be achieved using either simpler count-based approaches (CPM100 and CPM150) or machine learning models (Soj1x and Soj3x). Wrist methods did not provide accurate or precise estimates of SB. The development of large open-source free-living calibration data sets may lead to improvements in SB estimates.