ActiGraph Launches Proximity Tagging for Bluetooth Smart Activity Monitors

Pensacola, FL-Feb. 3, 2014 – ActiGraph, a leading provider of objective physical activity and sleep/wake measurement solutions for the global research community, has launched a new proximity tagging feature for its suite of Bluetooth Smart activity monitors, providing researchers with new and unique opportunities to enhance the contextual meaning of their actigraphy data.

ActiGraph’s new proximity tagging feature, available for the wGT3X-BT and wActiSleep-BT monitors, uses Bluetooth Smart technology to “tag” the presence of other nearby devices, enabling researchers to infer correlations between physical activity and location without the use of GPS. The scientific community now has the ability to glean information about total time spent and activity levels for subjects in various predefined locations throughout the home, workplace, vehicle, etc. Users also have the ability to examine the relationship between social interaction and physical activity behaviors by using the proximity tagging feature on multiple subject-worn devices. The low-power nature of Bluetooth Smart combined with ActiGraph’s highly efficient accelerometry system supports the collection of proximity data for up to a week without interference within the free-living environment.

“Proximity tagging really adds a whole new dimension to objective activity data by giving our clients the ability to observe and learn about how subjects behave and interact with one another within their environments,” said Jeff Miller, Senior Vice President of Engineering at ActiGraph. “It’s not every day that we can provide our users with an entirely new set of metrics to study, and we envision the emergence of a whole new subset of scientific research based on the information that proximity tagging delivers.”

About ActiGraph: ActiGraph’s extensively validated suite of hardware and software products are widely used by prominent scientific and academic organizations in more than 75 countries in research studies and clinical trials involving physical activity, energy expenditure, and sleep/wake behavior and their relationships to a wide range of health conditions including obesity, diabetes, cancer, CNS disorders, cardiovascular disease and sleep disorders. ActiGraph monitoring solutions have delivered objective data to many high profile population studies including the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), the Harvard Women’s Health Study, the European Youth Heart Study, and the U.K. Millennium Cohort Study.