Freedson Receives ActiGraph Lifetime Achievement Award

Professor Emerita of Kinesiology Patty Freedson was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award during the ActiGraph Digital Data Summit 2022 held Nov. 13-15 in Pensacola Beach, Florida. ActiGraph presented the award in recognition of her “immeasurable contributions to the field of actigraphy.”

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“I was honored to receive this award from Actigraph,” says Freedson. “Our university-industry partnership over 25 years was one of the most meaningful and impactful relationships I had at UMass. Our research calibrating their wearable devices to translate sensor signals into measures of physical activity has been extremely useful to their clinical trial work with the pharmaceutical industry. In addition, the graduate and undergraduate students in my lab gained valuable hands-on experiences that benefited them in their future careers.”

“Patty Freedson has been instrumental in establishing the field of physical activity measurement and is regarded as a key innovator and leader in the use of wearable devices to assess and promote physical activity,” says Richard van Emmerik, professor and chair of kinesiology. “She has not only been a leader in her field but also in the Department of Kinesiology and the campus, most clearly through her substantial contributions in establishing the Center for Personalized Health Monitoring at the Institute for Applied Life Sciences on the UMass Amherst campus.”

Freedson retired in 2016 after serving as a faculty member at UMass Amherst for 35 years, including 10 years in which she served as chair of the Department of Kinesiology. She is the founding editor of the Journal for the Measurement of Physical Behaviour, has published over 250 papers, and has lectured in the United States and abroad. Her NIH-funded research focused on developing and validating methods for estimating physical activity and sedentary behavior from wearable accelerometers. The goal of her physical activity measurement research is to improve our understanding of physical activity dose for surveillance, intervention and determinants studies. Her original activity monitor calibration was published in 1998 and remains a tool used by researchers around the world to estimate physical activity using objective accelerometer sensors. She also works with industry partners from the activity tracker market to improve the accuracy and precision of these popular consumer wearable devices.

Founded in 2004, ActiGraph is recognized as a pioneer in the field of motion-sensing wearable technology and is the most widely used medical-grade device of its kind. Their two-day digital data summit brought together speakers from across drug development, technology industries, and academia to share real-world experiences, lessons learned and visions for the future of wearable technology in clinical research and care. The organizers hope that these cross-disciplinary dialogues will inspire new initiatives and collaborations to accelerate the impact of digital technologies on people's health.