RESEARCH ARTICLE


Comparison of Accuracy Among Pedometers from Five Japanese Manufacturers



So Osawa1, *, Hisaaki Tabuchi1, Kenichi Nemoto2, Shuhei Tokimasa1, Shotaro Misaki1, Masao Okuhara3, Koji Terasawa4
1 1Shinshu University, Faculty of Education
2 2Human Science, Matsumoto University
3 3Management Information, Tokyo University of Science, Suwa,
4 Shinshu University Graduate School of Education and Medicine, Japan


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Creative Commons License
© 2013 Osawa et al.

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Shinshu University, Faculty of Education 6-Ro Nishi-Nagano, Nagano 380-8544, Japan; Tel: 026-238-4213; Fax: 026-238-4213; E-mail: 12ea502e@shinshu-u.ac.jp


Abstract

The reliability of commercially available pedometers is not known in detail. Therefore, the present study examines the accuracy and reliability of the FS500 (Acos), HJ301 (Omron), EX700 (Yamax), FB727 (Tanita) and TW600 (Citizen) pedometers to count steps and measure energy expenditure at various walking speeds. Twenty individuals (age, 32.5 ± 15.3 years; body mass index, 22.0 ± 1.6 kg/m2) walked at three speeds for 6 min. Step-counts and energy expenditure determined by each pedometer were compared with actual values. All five pedometers accurately measured steps at all speeds, but tended to underestimate expended calories to within 50% of the actual amount of energy expenditure. The correlation coefficients (R) between actual energy expenditure and pedometer values were between 0.74 and 0.87. Thus, feedback about energy expenditure is somewhat inaccurate. In contrast, step counts are very accurate, and thus pedometers are useful tools with which to indicate daily exercise levels.

Keywords: Energy Expenditure, Kilocalories, Pedometer, Speed, Step Counter, Walking.