Movement and the office: trying to detect it.

Abstract

Many people, especially office workers, sit for much of the day, with potentially serious consequences for their heath. In response, the message from health authorities around the world is clear; ‘Sit less and move more’. However, the effects of many of the interventions aimed at helping office workers to sit less and move more at work, quickly fade, or result in sitting being replaced with prolonged standing, which also has potentially serious health impacts. A crucial step in the development of more effective, durable interventions could be to locate where in the office movement behaviours occur and investigate the influence the office environment has on these behaviours. However, commonly used devices such as accelerometers provide limited, if any, location information, while surveys and observations only provide brief glimpses of location and are open to recall and other biases. Research from various disciplines suggests that indoor positioning systems (IPS) may be useful for investigating movement behaviours in the office environment. Yet little is known about the use of IPS in offices, including their accuracy, how they compare to accelerometers, their data collection periods, and whether their data can be combined with environmental data. Consequently, this thesis sought to answer two interrelated research questions: 1) Can IPS data be used to measure, analyse, and describe the movement behaviours of office workers in an open-plan office? and 2) Is there a relationship between these behaviours and the physical environment of the office? The methods used in this thesis build a firm foundation for further research into the relationship between movement behaviours and office environments. The findings also provide much needed guidance for other researchers considering the use of IPS in offices and other indoor settings. Finally, this thesis presents several promising avenues to explore in the quest to help office workers move more while at work.