Device-Based Measures of Sit-to-Stand Transitions for 156 UK Employees

Approximately 30,000 posture transitions during work time were objectively measured from 156 UK-based employees using activPAL monitors worn for about one week. The data was collected for a PNAS paper by Pam ten Broeke of Radboud University Nijmegen in 2020, analyzing sitting behavior as a continuous chain of transitions. It was split into training and testing samples for a preregistered analysis.

Use Cases

• Modeling the timing of posture transitions based on objectively-measured activPAL data.
• Training predictive models for sit-to-stand and stand-to-sit events using a split-samples cross-validation procedure.
• Analyzing workplace sedentary behavior patterns from a continuous chain of transitions.
• Conducting power simulations for studies on device-measured human activity.

Strengths

• Contains ~30,000 posture transitions, providing a substantial event count.
• Data from 156 participants offers a moderate sample size for group-level analysis.
• Uses a preregistered analysis plan on a held-out testing sample (n=77), supporting methodological rigor.
• Includes R code for data processing, analysis, visualization, and power simulation.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count for the full dataset is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic and occupational bias inherent to the UK-based employee sample.

Provenance

Source

Pam ten Broeke, Radboud University Nijmegen

Collection Method

Objectively measured by activPAL monitors continuously worn for approximately one week.

Time Range

2020

Geography

United Kingdom (various work sites)