For nearly a decade primary school children in the North East have learned about fitness and nutrition through Newcastle United Foundation’s Match Fit programme. Now, a digital civics project aims to enhance this six-week programme by using digital technologies to further increase the fitness and health awareness of primary school children.

Students taking part in Match Fit learn about nutrition and exercise, as well as taking part in extensive physical activity, all inspired by the fitness regime of Newcastle United’s footballers.

ThinkActive.io takes this project one stage further by using sensors to measure the movement of the children to see just how active they are. Inexpensive fitness trackers report on step counts over the course of the programme to evidence behaviour change.

The goal of ThinkActive.io is to is to engage students with their own activity and nutritional data to enhance data literacy and help them learn about how health and fitness can be supported by technology. The data collected through the programme can also be used as an engaging educational resource by teachers; hopefully a more critical understanding of data provides students with the skills to be engaged digital citizens.

For more information please contact Andy Garbett.

Open source sensors developed at Open Lab, Newcastle University, are behind the largest study of physical activity ever conducted.

Biobanks are becoming an increasingly important tool in medical research, offering an opportunity to study human health on a massive scale. Since 2007 UK Biobank has collected data about the genetic and biological information of half a million volunteers. They provided blood, urine and saliva samples and detailed information about their health, so that researchers can investigate possible genetic links to major illnesses such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes.

Since its foundation UK Biobank has expanded to collect data on other areas as well, including diet, bone structure and physical activity. To measure activity UK Biobank uses sensors, worn on the wrist for a week, that measure the movements of participants. These sensors were designed by Open Lab.

This has been the biggest physical activity study in history. 103,712 people wore the sensors, contributing a total of 2,000 years’ worth of movement data. This data can be used to investigate the impact of physical activity on health. Previous studies relied on self-reporting by participants, but Biobank’s new physical activity dataset offers much more accurate information.

“Large-scale studies are required to reliably understand the causes and consequences of disease,” said Dr Aiden Doherty from the University of Oxford. “UK Biobank’s combination of activity, imaging, genetics, and clinical databases, will soon help us better understand physical activity and its health consequences.”

The study used AX3 acceleration sensors that were designed in Open Lab and manufactured by Axivity Ltd, a Newcastle University spin-out.

“It’s actually a relatively simple device, in many ways just like your average wearable fitness tracker but with the capability to store the raw unprocessed data on the device,” explained Patrick Olivier. “However, key to the success of this project was the low cost of the device, compared to commercially available alternatives, and that we were able to adapt the device programming interface to UK Biobank’s central database of participant contact information so that the right device was sent to the right person, allowing us to link it to the other data they provided on their behaviour and health.”

Open Lab also helped to analyse the data collected by the sensors. The Biobank data will be available for use by researchers around the world, as Dr Tim Peakman, Deputy Chief Executive Officer for UK Biobank, explained.

“A huge amount of work has gone into reaching this milestone,” he said. “Including setting up and sending out thousands of devices, retrieving and downloading their data and checking its integrity, and addressing the many challenges of processing this data, which is now available for other researchers to request by making an application to the UK Biobank team.”

Not only is the data open to other researchers, but the sensors themselves are open source, meaning that other studies could exactly replicate the design.

Professor Nick Wareham, Director of the MRC Epidemiology Unit, said: “UK Biobank has redefined what is possible in the field of physical activity epidemiology; it is truly a game changer, effectively dispelling the myth that objective monitoring cannot be done at this very large scale.

“This development not only makes it possible to robustly examine associations and interactions between activity, diseases, environmental factors and genetics, it also paves the way for stronger surveillance systems of physical activity at the global level.”

The project involved researchers from Newcastle University, the University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, University of Salford, and University of London, as well as UK Biobank. Development of the AX3 sensor was supported by funding from the Research Councils UK Digital Economy theme.

“Large Scale Population Assessment of Physical Activity Using Wrist Worn Accelerometers: The UK Biobank Study” http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0169649

Written by Mark Sleightholm. For more information please contact Patrick Olivier.

Food, energy and water usage are so interconnected that reducing our consumption of one will have a significant impact on the others. Geremy discusses his research into mapping the food energy water nexus, and the implications this could have for increasing sustainability in the future.

After working for Panasonic for several years, Toshiyuki has experience of research into data mining and artificial intelligence. In this lab talk he discusses his previous and current work, ranging from monitoring of elderly people to song analysis and sports movement analysis.

Phil James from the Urban Observatory came to Open Lab to talk about his work:

“A superficial reading of the press and the greater internet would suggest that the era of Smart Cities is already here,” Phil explained.

“All we need to realise this is finance and the political will. In reality, whilst many cities declare they are “Smart” the smartness resides in small pilot projects, or marketing hype.

“Here in Newcastle our approach is to develop a city test bed at the scale of the city to attempt to push the limits of sensor technology and understand their applications, develop holistic systems with multiple sensor types and data streams and learn how different types of monitoring data from physical observations to people’s impressions and ideas can be integrated to develop an Urban Observatory.

“The Urban Observatory programme is developing platform agnostic monitoring systems sampling many environmental and human factors across multiple spatial and temporal scales and addressing the socio-technical problems associated with large scale monitoring.

“The Urban Observatory provides a platform for research and it’s open data ethos means that anybody can access and use this data.

“We are currently working with a number of groups and researchers looking at well-being, community noise mapping, air quality interactions, data visualisation, integrated monitoring and real-time modelling, computer architectures for edge and cloud processing in sensor systems. We have a rolling programme of sensor deployments over the next 4 years focussed on research-driven monitoring. We currently received over 1,000,000 observations a day from over 300 sensors.”