Life Style Evaluation by Accelerometer

Introduction

The daily evaluation of the life style is the first step to start with the” Exercise as prescription “that represents a new and helpful therapy in several kinds of patients. Particularly in subjects at high risk level, a correct investigation of the daily Spontaneous Physical Activity (SPA) in term of time, frequency, intensity and kind of exercise can play a relevant role to plan the “exercise as prescription” program (Lee, 2010; Brown & Siahpush, 2007). It has been proved that a correct life style is associated to a progressive reduction of acute events and increase of survival. It is reasonable to think that and adequate life style can also produce a reduction social costs mainly in terms of drugs and also costs social assistance. The necessity to distinguish sedentary from non-sedentary subjects (Historical leisure activity questionnaire, 1997), a longer period of registration by an accelerometer, can verify the effective SPA and quantify the time spends to practice exercise at different level of intensity (Bravata, et al., 2007; Bassett et al., 2010). It is note that the poor recognition of physical inactivity may be in fact an important barrier to improve the healthy behavior change (Ronda, Van Asserrna, & Brug, 2001). Respect of simple questionnaire, where the information of the life style are often summarized, the accelerometer can discover the presence of several “daily sedentary behaviors “ and therefore can play an educational role promoting an improvement of the own LS (Klem et al., 1997; Melanson et al., 2004; Tudor –Locke et al., 2001). Particularly in case of ambulatory patients, where the main goal is to reduce the cardiovascular risks, the accelerometer, for its peculiar small size and easy employment, can be considered to better visualize the effective exposure to sedentary life style. It is reasonable to think that this kind of approach, applied at the onset of a program of exercise as therapy and whose intensity is often at the beginning difficult to establish, can be helpful toward a stronger of and objective realization of the real characteristics of own LS (Bravata et al., 2007; Tudor-Locke & Basset Jr., 2004). The aim of the manuscript is to highlights the role of accelerometer in identifying sedentary behaviors and also to quantify the immediate positive impact on the improvement of the main anthropometrics and body composition parameters. For this reason an investigation in a cohort of subjects at high risk level as overweight hypertensive subjects has been conducted. In consequence of this application, this popular tool, normally induce to motivate their Physical Activity (PA).