Variability in Physical Inactivity Responses of University Students during COVID-19 Pandemic: A Monitoring of Daily Step Counts Using a Smartphone Application

Abstract

This study investigated the changes in physical inactivity of university students during the COVID-19 pandemic, with reference to their academic calendar. We used the daily step counts recorded by a smartphone application (iPhone Health App) from April 2020 to January 2021 (287 days) for 603 participants. The data for 287 days were divided into five periods based on their academic calendar. The median value of daily step counts across each period was calculated. A k-means clustering analysis was performed to classify the 603 participants into subgroups to demonstrate the variability in the physical inactivity responses. The median daily step counts, with a 7-day moving average, dramatically decreased from 5000 to 2000 steps/day in early April. It remained at a lower level (less than 2000 steps/day) during the first semester, then increased to more than 5000 steps/day at the start of summer vacation. The clustering analysis demonstrated the variability in physical inactivity responses. The inactive students did not recover daily step counts throughout the year. Consequently, promoting physical activity is recommended for inactive university students over the course of the whole semester.

Daily step counts before, during, and after COVID-19 pandemic: a smartphone-tracking study of university students in Egypt and Saudi Arabia

“…Our data showed a significant reduction in daily step counts during the first pandemic year, followed by an increase in the second pandemic year. This finding suggests that the pandemic had a negative impact on physical activity levels among university students, which is consistent with previous studies conducted among general populations around the world during the COVID-19 pandemic [ 17 , 23 , 26 – 35 ]. This indicates that the pandemic preventive measures have completely changed the university students’ lifestyle, especially for teaching activities that have been turned to be delivered in digital form with extreme restrictions related to any campus activity [ 26 – 30 ].…”

Growth in the development of health and fitness mobile apps amid COVID-19 pandemic

“…In our dataset, 19,083 apps had descriptions written in a non-English language. The language of each app description was detected using the langdetect package of python 4 . In our dataset, 44 languages were detected other than English, which included Spanish (3590 apps), German (2346 apps), Italian (2298 apps), Portuguese (2280 apps), French (1448), Dutch (1056), Japanese (908), and Russian (894).…”

“… 1 Collective trauma is defined as a significant event that negatively affects the population. 2 The pandemic declined people's physical activity as observed by Janovský et al 3 and Konda et al 4 Specifically, the pandemic hampered fitness activities in gyms and encouraged people to explore alternate fitness activities such as workouts at home, yoga, and meditation, as Kaur et al 5 discussed. Technology has played a pivotal role in maintaining H-F activities during the pandemic through mHealth (mobile health) and mobile apps.…”

Physical activity before, during, and after COVID-19 pandemic: a smartphone-tracking study of university students in Egypt and Saudi Arabia

“…Indeed, smartphone technology (mobile health apps) monitoring health-related physical activity status has always been classi ed as a valid and reliable methodology, especially among adults during the pandemic [18]. These apps, as a tool for electronic surveys, can guarantee a signi cant sample for screening studies, primarily when it's used to monitor daily step counts among different countries and populations [16][17][18][19][20].…”