Quantification of Heterogeneous Semi-Structured Patient-Reported Physical Activities Derived from a Diabetes Telehealth Service

Telehealth systems have shown to facilitate lifestyle changes like an increase in physical activity. Therefore, an easily quantifiable measure of physical activity levels for both assessing a patient's status quo and tracking physical activity development is needed. The aim of this work was to map semi-structured activities reported as type-intensity-duration triplets in the DiabMemory telehealth system to Metabolic Equivalents of Task (METs). The activity data of 947 telehealth patients were analyzed to create a mapping table between type-intensity pairs and MET values from a preexisting compendium. Additionally, the distribution of activity types and resulting MET scores was evaluated. Combining the MET scores with the duration resulted in the quantified activity measure (MET-minutes). A significant difference in the MET-minutes per activity type (p < 0.0001) was identified. In the future, our method of mapping semi-structured data to METs will serve as a support the evaluation of the effectiveness of DiabMemory.