Scott Crouter
University of Tennessee-Knoxville, TN·Public Health & Epidemiology
Researchers who study how exercise and sitting affect health need to know what people actually do all day and how many calories they burn. Wearable devices are the main way to measure this outside the lab.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Physiology
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
physical activity
energy expenditure
sedentary behavior
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2027
What they work on
- Develop and validate machine learning models that use both accelerometer and gyroscope data to classify activity type and estimate energy expenditure, tested against a 24-hour room calorimetry stay and portable calorimetry in adults.
- Assess how well the gyroscope-inclusive models perform in 100 adults during 12 hours of free-living activity, then retrain them using direct video observation and portable indirect calorimetry as ground truth.
- Test the validity of the energy expenditure models over a prolonged free-living period, comparing them with total energy use measured by the doubly-labeled water technique.
More about the research
However, today's devices rely on accelerometers, sensors that record straight-line motion. They are reasonably accurate for groups but less so for individuals, and their accuracy has stopped improving. Many daily activities also involve turning motions that accelerometers miss.
Why it matters
More accurate wearable measurement of activity type and calories burned would help public health researchers study how sitting and physical activity relate to health in adults. This includes measuring how much activity is needed for a given health benefit. Better individual-level estimates could strengthen the evidence behind physical activity guidelines.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Samuel Urlacher
Baylor University, TX·Social Science
Measure total energy expenditure in children aged 3–10 using doubly labeled water, a method that tracks harmless isotope-tagged water to calculate daily calorie use.
Aaron Norris
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Neuroscience
Measure and manipulate supramammillary nucleus neurons with fiber photometry and optogenetics to define their timing and causal role during threat learning, avoidance and extinction in mice.
Sunghoon Lee
University of Massachusetts, MA·Biomedical Engineering
Develop a Body Channel Identification (BCID) sensing platform, with batteryless object tags read by a wrist-worn device through the body during touch, that records object identity, contact timing, grip pressure and wrist motion.
The school
University of Tennessee-Knoxville: 16 labs on PI Pages, $387M a year on research, 426 research doctorates a year.
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