Objective: We propose a new health informatics framework to analyze physical activity (PA) from accelerometer devices. Accelerometry data enables scientists to extract personal digital features useful for precision health decision making. Existing methods in accelerometry data analysis typically begin with discretizing summary counts by certain fixed cutoffs into activity categories. One well-known limitation is that the chosen cutoffs are often validated under restricted settings, and cannot be generalizable across populations, devices, or studies.
Methods: We develop a data-driven approach to overcome this bottleneck in PA data analysis, in which we holistically summarize a subject's activity profile using Occupation-Time curves (OTCs), which describe the percentage of time spent at or above a continuum of activity count levels. We develop multi-step adaptive learning algorithms to perform supervised learning via a scalar-on-function model that involves OTC as the functional predictor of interest as well as other scalar covariates. Our learning analytic first incorporates a hybrid approach of fused lasso for clustering and Hidden Markov Model for changepoint detection, then executes refinement procedures to determine activity windows of interest.
Results: We evaluate and illustrate the performance of the proposed learning analytic through simulation experiments and real-world data analyses to assess the influence of PA on biological aging. Our findings indicate a different directional relationship between biological age and PA depending on the specific outcome of interest.
Significance: Our bioinformatics methodology involves the biomedical outcome of interest to detect different critical points, and is thus adaptive to the specific data, study population, and health outcome under investigation.