image: Bridget Armstrong is an assistant professor of Exercise Science.
Credit: Anna Wippold
Exercise science assistant professor Bridget Armstrong has been awarded $3.5 million from the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute. She will use the five-year R01 grant to test the effectiveness of PATCH (Platform for Accurate Tracking of Children’s Health). The wearable device was designed by exercise science and electrical engineering faculty in 2020 to measure children’s routine activities (e.g., physical activity, sedentary time, sleep etc.).
“Assessing children’s 24-hour movement behaviors can reveal the complex and interdependent ways energy expenditure and sleep are related to health outcomes,” Armstrong says. “However, assessing these activities among children in free-living conditions is inherently difficult, and every available method has its own limitations.”
Previous research has shown that devices that measure both heart rate and accelerometry offer the most precise estimates of activity and sleep. Yet those that do measure both (e.g., ActiHeart, Fitbit) are not designed for children. They can be distracting, uncomfortable and inaccurate. Further, most commercially available trackers use proprietary algorithms that do not allow access to the raw data that researchers need to analyze.
Enter PATCH. This small (only one inch by one inch), open-source wearable device integrates multiple sensors that accurately capture everyday activities. Custom-made to meet the needs of scientists and the comfort of kids, PATCH is designed to be unobtrusive, water resistant and worn for many hours/days (important for scientific studies).
The team has already conducted a pilot study funded by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. Using a $420K R21 grant, Armstrong and members of the Arnold Healthy Kids Initiative and Research Center for Child Well-Being invited 60 children (ages three to eight years old) to test drive an early version of the device with promising results.
With this study, the team will conduct a series of studies to establish PATCH’s validity in both laboratory and free-living conditions. If their research establishes its effectiveness, this device (made from off-the-shelf parts) and its open-source software could be a game-changer for scientists working to combat the childhood obesity epidemic.
“Our long-term goal is to give scientists better tools to measure kids' energy expenditure and sleep when they are outside the lab, going about their daily lives; doing so is essential if we want to understand how kids grow, move and develop,” Armstrong says. “The results from this project will help other researchers to build their own PATCH device and independently process the data, thereby overcoming issues related to proprietary hardware and algorithms that currently limit the field of wearable devices.”