Automatic time in bed detection from hip-worn accelerometers for large epidemiological studies: The Tromsø Study

Accelerometers are frequently used to assess physical activity in large epidemiological studies. They can monitor movement patterns and cycles over several days under free-living conditions and are usually either worn on the wrist or the hip. While wrist-worn accelerometers have been frequently used to additionally assess sleep and time in bed behavior, hip-worn accelerometers have been widely neglected for this task due to their primary focus on physical activity. Here, we present a new method with the objective to identify the time in bed to enable further analysis options for large-scale studies using hip-placement like time in bed or sedentary time analyses. We introduced new and accelerometer-specific data augmentation methods, such as mimicking a wrongly worn accelerometer, additional noise, and random croping, to improve training and generalization performance. Subsequently, we trained a neural network model on a sample from the population-based Tromsø Study and evaluated it on two additional datasets. Our algorithm achieved an accuracy of 94% on the training data, 92% on unseen data from the same population and comparable results to consumer-wearable data obtained from a demographically different population. Generalization performance was overall good, however, we found that on a few particular days or participants, the trained model fundamentally over- or underestimated time in bed (e.g., predicted all or nothing as time in bed). Despite these limitations, we anticipate our approach to be a starting point for more sophisticated methods to identify time in bed or at some point even sleep from hip-worn acceleration signals. This can enable the re-use of already collected data, for example, for longitudinal analyses where sleep-related research questions only recently got into focus or sedentary time needs to be estimated in 24 h wear protocols.