In-hospital physical activity measured with a new Bosch accelerometer sensor system

Extended hospital stays and readmissions are associated with high costs and burden of disease. Effective ways to predict patient outcomes, select those at risk of adverse outcomes, and to prevent these accordingly, are lacking. Physical activity measured by accelerometry is a promising surrogate parameter of health, but it is mainly evaluated in highly selected patient groups and with few algorithms. We used a new wrist-worn Bosch sensor platform to measure various characteristics of physical activity in 58 patients of various ages treated on internal medicine wards over a period of 30 days, with a goal of developing algorithms to predict duration of hospitalization and 30-day readmission. New algorithms are required to increase the accuracy of the predictions and to understand the significance of physical activity in hospitalized patients. To facilitate research in this area, and to allow the public to explore these issues, all data generated in the study are published here as a public dataset.