Human Movement Research Sensors

Wearable accelerometers built for scientific measurement. Used in longitudinal studies, clinical trials and population research worldwide.

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A hand holding an AX3 accelerometer, showing its size against the palm

1Raw triaxial acceleration

The signal, before anyone decides what it means

An Axivity device records continuous triaxial acceleration and hands it over unchanged, in an open format. There is no proprietary scoring algorithm between the measurement and the analysis, so the record below is what the instrument wrote, not a summary of it.

Time (days)

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100 Hz, decimated for display

Fig. 1 Triaxial acceleration recorded on the non-dominant wrist at 100 Hz. Unfiltered; no epoch aggregation and no activity scoring applied. Quiet bands are nocturnal wear. Illustrative synthetic record, generated to the sampling rate and dynamic range of an AX3. Awaiting a real seven-day recording from Axivity.

Read the data format and download OMGUI

2Instruments

Two loggers, both built for multi-day recording

Both devices write to on-board flash against a real-time quartz clock, are configured in batches with OMGUI, and download as .CWA files.

An AX3 lying beside a UK five-pence coin, a little wider than the coin

AX3

An AX6 lying beside the same five-pence coin, the same width as the AX3

AX6

Fig. 2 Both loggers beside the same five-pence coin. Same width, same weight. The AX6 is 1.3 mm thicker, which this view is too flat to show. This is the whole of what a participant carries, continuously, for the length of a study.

Full catalogue, including accessories and discontinued hardware

3Published record

Measured in work you can check

Four papers below, from four different fields. The rest are on the publications page.

1589

Published studies and conference papers that used an Axivity device

Nearly all link straight to the paper, so you can check that the measurement was ours and the finding is theirs. Coverage depends on researchers reporting their own work. Papers are missing.

UK Biobank added seven-day wrist measurement with the AX3 in 2012, at population scale. The methods paper is below.

  1. Population cohort

    Large scale population assessment of physical activity using wrist worn accelerometers: The UK Biobank Study

    Doherty A, Jackson D, Hammerla N, Plötz T, Olivier P, Granat MH, White T, van Hees VT, Trenell MI, Owen CG, Preece SJ.

  2. Parkinson's disease

    A model of free-living gait: A factor analysis in Parkinson's disease

    Morris, R., Hickey, A., Del Din, S., Godfrey, A., Lord, S. and Rochester, L.

  3. Equine biomechanics

    Preliminary comparative study of two accelerometers performances for evaluation of dorsoventral movement in trotting horse

    Brouillet, N., Jarlot, B., Pillard, P., Bertucci, W. and Viguier, E.

  4. Wear compliance

    Wear-Time Compliance with a Dual-Accelerometer System for Capturing 24-h Behavioural Profiles in Children and Adults

    Scott Duncan, Tom Stewart, Lisa Mackay, Jono Neville, Anantha Narayanan, Caroline Walker, Sarah Berry, Susan Morton

All publications, searchable by year and keywordThe UK Biobank deployment

4Applications

What people measure with them

Fourteen days at 100 Hz on an AX3, or a month at low rates on either device.

Physical activity measurement
Free-living intensity, sedentary time, and whether the device was worn at all.
Sleep and rest timing
Nocturnal movement and wake episodes, scored by whichever algorithm you trust.
Animal behaviour studies
Worn by horses and dogs as well as people.
Clinical and movement research
Gait, postural transitions and tremor, on the raw signal.

Research and analysis