“When everyone started carrying phones, I said, ‘We have to be able to track people’s motion. It’s a worldwide experiment and everyone is participating,’” says Scott Delp, a professor of bioengineering and mechanical engineering at Stanford.
And so they did. Delp and his team found a way to conduct a worldwide survey of how much people move, by collecting data sets from a smartphone app that track steps. The idea is to analyze the connections between step count and health, and then to share that learning with others for use in policy and health interventions.
“The United States has low average activity, but there are some people who move a lot and some people who basically don’t move at all,” Delp says. “And these people who are ‘activity poor,’ they are the ones who are at risk, and that’s where intervention should be targeted.”
The graphic below outlines some of the team’s findings.
Illustration: Nigel Holmes
