Alhassan receives NIH grant to study physical activity in children and adolescents

Sofiya Alhassan, assistant professor of Kinesiology, has received federal funding to help her develop and validate new methods for processing physical activity in children age 8 through 16. Alhassan received the two-year, $280,937 grant from the National Institutes of Health that will fund the study as part of a larger $1.2 million award that is being used to develop similar methods in adults.

Alhassan says the new grant will allow her to develop methods of reading the devices worn by children during various types of physical activity. The readings are taken on a wearable accelerometer that can be used to identify time spent in various physical activity. She says measuring activity in children is different from measuring physical activity in adults because it is confounded by their growth and maturation.

“Findings from this research will allow us to derive more accurate and detailed estimates of physical activity in children,” Alhassan says. “This systematic approach will provide information leading to a clearer understanding of the dose-response relationship between physical activity and various outcomes in children such as obesity.”

This latest grant is part of a five-year, $1.2 million NIH award last summer to Patty S. Freedson, professor and chair in the Kinesiology Department. Freedson, in collaboration with assistant professor John W. Staudenmayer and professor John P. Buonocorsi of the Mathematics and Statistics Department, is developing pattern recognition algorithms from wearable accelerometers used by adults.

Alhassan will extend this work by applying these methods for activity identification and estimating the energy cost of physical activity in children and adolescents. The wearable accelerometer is used to objectively assess physical activity in a free-living environment and can collect and store temporal patterns of physical activity over several days or weeks.

A recent report commissioned by U.S. Secretary Levitt and the Department of Health and Human Services called for more research on the use of motion sensors and physiological monitoring. It says these technologies have the potential to greatly improve the accuracy and reliability of physical activity assessment in free-living populations leading to a better understanding of health benefits and dose response. Development and evaluation of these technologies are needed for assessing populations with different activity profiles and sociodemographic characteristics. The grants awarded to the campus researchers directly address the call for the development and evaluation of novel data-processing methodologies.

July 23, 2008.

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