ArticleFrontiers in digital health2023
Digital technologies for step counting: between promises of reliability and risks of reductionism.
Article in Frontiers in digital health, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Using an Adult-Designed Wearable for Pediatric Monitoring: Practical Tutorial and Application in School-Aged Children With Obesity.Journal of medical Internet research · 2026Article
- Article
- Big Data, Machine Learning, and Personalization in Health Systems: Ethical Issues and Emerging Trade-Offs.Science and engineering ethics · 2025Article
- Classification of User Behavior Patterns for Indoor Navigation Problem.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Developing Infrastructure to Realize the Value of Patient-Generated Health Data in a Large Integrated Health Care System: The Veterans Health Administration Experience.Journal of medical Internet research · 2025Article
- Wearable devices for patient monitoring in the intensive care unit.Intensive care medicine experimental · 2025Review
- Exploring the Potential of Electronic Patient-Generated Health Data for Evaluating Treatment Response to Intramuscular Steroids in Rheumatoid Arthritis: Case Series.JMIR formative research · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Step counting is among the fundamental features of wearable technology, as it grounds several uses of wearables in biomedical research and clinical care, is at the center of emerging public health interventions and recommendations, and is gaining increasing scientific and political importance. This paper provides a perspective of step counting in wearable technology, identifying some limitations to the ways in which wearable technology measures steps and indicating caution in current uses of step counting as a proxy for physical activity. Based on an overview of the current state of the art of technologies and approaches to step counting in digital wearable technologies, we discuss limitations that are methodological as well as epistemic and ethical-limitations to the use of step counting as a basis to build scientific knowledge on physical activity (epistemic limitations) as well as limitations to the accessibility and representativity of these tools (ethical limitations). As such, using step counting as a proxy for physical activity should be considered a form of reductionism. This is not
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.