Smartphones could soon be a way for researchers to predict obesity rates world-wide, according to a global study by Stanford researchers.
They observed that in countries with little obesity, people mostly walked a similar amount per day. But big gaps between people who walked a lot and those who walked very little coincided with much higher levels of obesity.
Since an estimated 5.3 million people die from causes associated with physical inactivity every year, these researchers teamed up with mobile health startup Azumio to see if variations in step counts could help predict a country’s obesity levels, which is similar to the model used to track income inequality.
The study published in Nature details how they tracked physical activity by population in more than 100 countries, including the United States to Norway, India and the Philippines, and captured data from more than 700,000 anonymous smartphone users. This data in turn, was used to reveal that not only could inequality in step counts predict a country’s obesity levels, but in some countries, this “activity inequality” was closely linked to a gender disparity in step count.
The study found that in countries like the U.S., there is a greater population of people
with obesity, and that the gap between women’s and men’s activity levels is wider. Whereas, in a country like Japan, where the obesity level is low, the activity gap between men and women is much smaller.“Today through the quantified self and through these wearable electronic devices, we are monitoring ourselves 24/7. This is the first study that shows what is possible. It’s clear that this is where the future is.” Says study co-author Jure Leskovec, on how smartphones qualify as a tool for research of this sort, and how this seemingly is just the beginning for the possibilities for studies using smartphone data.
“What we want to do is understand how we can intervene and motivate healthy activities and one way to do that is to ask how to better design our cities, how do we make them friendly for pedestrians? If you make them friendly for pedestrians, people seem to walk there more. And that has a connection to obesity and public health.” Concludes Scott Delp, a bioengineer at Stanford and lead researcher of the study.
