Increasingly, efforts to promote and measure physical activity are achieving greater precision, greater ease of use, and/or greater scope by incorporating emerging technologies. This is significant for physical activity promotion because more precise measurement will allow investigators to better understand where, when, and how physical activity is and is not occurring, thus enabling more effective targeting of particular behavior settings. Emerging technologies associated with the measurement and evaluation of physical activity are noteworthy because: (1) Their ease of use and transferability can greatly increase external validity of measures and findings; (2) Technologies can significantly increase the ability to analyze patterns; (3) They can improve the ongoing, systematic collection and analysis of public health surveillance due to real-time capabilities associated with many emerging technologies; (4) There is a need for research and papers about the cyberinfrastructure required to cope with big data (multiple streams, processing, aggregation, visualization, etc.); and (5) Increasingly blurred boundaries between measurement and intervention activity (e.g., the quantified-self /self-tracking movement) |