Calculating Activity Duration

Find out the ratio of total sedentary time vs. total walking time of your participants throughout the data collection period.

A lot of health researchers are interested in knowing how much time a participant was active vs. how much time they were sedentary. In under a minute, we'll show you how to calculate activity duration from Garmin's activity data using Excel and Labfront.

Let’s say I’d like to find out the ratio of total sedentary time vs. total walking time of my participants throughout my week of data collection.
The first thing to do would be to see if that ratio is offered in the Activity CSV file. Unfortunately, it’s not, but Garmin does offer what is called an Epoch’s data file which has activity recorded in intervals of 15min (or 900s)
In this file, we get the total walking time in seconds of that 15 min interval, as well as the total sedentary time in seconds of that same 15 min. In order to calculate the ratio of total sedentary to walking time throughout that week, we would do the following:
1. Copy the Activity type and Active time columns into a new sheet.
2. Create a new column for sedentary time, and another one for walking time. In order to map these values, update your function as follows:
3. if the value at A2 is sedentary, then fill with B2, and if that claim is false, fill that cell with a “0.”
4. Click ‘fill’ and downfill for the entire column
5. Obtain hours of total record/sedentary/walking time
From those sums, you can easily calculate the ratios of total sedentary vs. walking time.

Course episodes

Part 1: Study Preparation

Intro to Physiological Data Collection

Metrics and Measures

Selecting a Device

Pulling the Data

Integrating With Other Tools

IRB Compliance

Part 2: Data Collection and Analysis

Piloting Your Study

Monitoring Adherence

Intro to Data Analytics

Calculating Heart Rate Distribution

Calculating Activity Duration

Time-Domain HRV

Outro - Start Collecting Physiological Data