Analysis of Daily Physical Activity by Garmin Smartwatches: A 7-Month Experiment

It is well-known, especially nowadays, how a regular amount of daily physical activity allows people to stay healthy, to reduce their risk of chronic diseases, and to improve their quality of life. To this end, technological solutions—in particular, wearable devices like smartwatches—can be considered as effective tools to enable self-monitoring of users, who can gain awareness of their health status and can possibly share information with medical personnel in the case of need. In this paper, an Internet of Things (IoT) architecture for long-time monitoring and daily physical activity quantification of healthy adults is presented. The proposed system exploits the availability of Garmin smartwatches worn by adult volunteers to collect multiple activity indicators, which are then properly processed in order to quantify the daily physical activity of each monitored subject. This is expedient to experimentally evaluate an innovative performance index, referred to as Physical Activity Index (PAI).