Accelerometry-based Energy Expenditure Estimation During Activities of Daily Living: A Comparison Among Different Accelerometer Compositions

Physical activity energy expenditure (PAEE) can be measured from breath-by-breath respiratory data, which can serve as a reference. Alternatively, PAEE can be predicted from the body movements, which can be measured and estimated with accelerometers. The body center of mass (COM) acceleration reflects the movements of the whole body and thus serves as a good predictor for PAEE. However, the wrist has also become a popular location due to recent advancements in wrist-worn devices. Therefore, in this work, using the respiratory data measured by COSMED K5 as the reference, we evaluated and compared the performances of COM-based settings and wrist-based settings. The COM-based settings include two different accelerometer compositions, using only the pelvis accelerometer (pelvis-acc) and the pelvis accelerometer with two accelerometers from two thighs (3-acc). The wrist-based settings include using only the left wrist accelerometer (l-wrist-acc) and only the right wrist accelerometer (r-wrist-acc). We implemented two existing PAEE estimation methods on our collected dataset, where 9 participants performed activities of daily living while wearing 5 accelerometers (i.e., pelvis, two thighs, and two wrists). These two methods include a linear regression (LR) model and a CNN-LSTM model. Both models yielded the best results with the COM-based 3-acc setting (LR: R2 = 0.41, CNN-LSTM: R2 = 0.53). No significant difference was found between the 3-acc and pelvis-acc settings (p-value = 0.278). For both models, neither the l-wrist-acc nor the r-wrist-acc settings demonstrated predictive power on PAEE with R2 values close to 0, significantly outperformed by the two COM-based settings (p-values < 0.05). No significant difference was found between the two wrists (p-value = 0.329).