Daniel Fuller

Memorial University of Newfoundland · School of Human Kinetics and Recreation

Many studies have explored divergent deep neural networks in human activity recognition (HAR) using a single accelerometer sensor. Multiple types of deep neural networks, such as convolutional neural networks (CNN), long short-term memory (LSTM), or their hybridization (CNN-LSTM), have been implemented. However, the sensor orientation problem poses...

Background Built and social environments are associated with physical activity. Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and accelerometer data can capture how people move through their environments and provide promising tools to better understand associations between environmental characteristics and physical activity. The purpose of this study is to exam...

Walkability is a term that describes various aspects of the built and social environment and has been associated with physical activity and public health. Walkability is subjective and although multiple definitions of walkability exist, there is no single agreed upon definition. Road networks are integral parts of mobility and should be an importan...

BACKGROUND The Canadian 24-Hour Movement Guidelines (24HMG) for Adults provide specific recommendations for levels of physical activity, sedentary behaviour, and sleep (i.e., the movement behaviours) required for optimal health. Performance of the movement behaviours is associated with improved mental wellbeing. However, most post-secondary student...

Objective This study uses machine learning (ML) to develop methods for estimating activity type/intensity using smartphones, to evaluate the accuracy of these models for classifying activity, and to evaluate differences in accuracy between three different wear locations. Method Forty-eight participants were recruited to complete a series of activi...

Introduction: Poor diet is a leading preventable risk for the global burden of non-communicable disease. Robust measurement is needed to determine the effect of COVID-19 on dietary intakes and consumer purchasing, given the widespread changes to consumer food environments and economic precarity. The research objectives are as follows: (1) describe...

The increasing availability of health monitoring devices and smartphones has created an opportunity for researchers to access high-resolution (spatial and temporal) mobility data for understanding travel behavior in cities. Although information from GPS data has been used in several studies to detect transportation modes, there is a research gap in...

Background Walkability is a popular term used to describe aspects of the built and social environment that have important population-level impacts on physical activity, energy balance, and health. Although the term is widely used by researchers, practitioners, and the general public, and multiple operational definitions and walkability measurement...

Measuring physical activity is a critical issue for our understanding of the health benefits of human movement. Machine learning (ML), using accelerometer data, has become a common way to measure physical activity. ML has failed physical activity measurement research in four important ways. First, as a field, physical activity researchers have not...

Quantifying urban forms to explore urban compactness or sprawl has become increasingly popular in multiple fields in the past decades. However, previous studies predominantly analyze the multidimensional phenomenon at large-area levels such as metropolitan areas, concealing variations that probably occur at small-area levels. Canadian studies measu...

Walkability is an important measure with strong ties to our health. However, there are existing gaps in the literature. Our previous work proposed new approaches to address existing limitations. This paper explores new ways of applying transferability using transfer-learning. Road networks, POIs, and road-related characteristics grow/change over ti...

Walkability is an important measure with strong ties to our health. However, there are existing gaps in the literature. Our previous work proposed new approaches to address existing limitations. This paper explores new ways of applying transferability using transfer-learning. Road networks, POIs, and road-related characteristics grow/change over ti...

Measuring environments around us (cities, roads, social environments) is crucial to understand human behaviour and help predict how aspects of environment influence behaviour and health. Walkability is one measure of environment used to predict health. Walkability combines aspects of environment (population, roads, amenities) into a single score. E...

Background Built environment interventions provide structural solutions to complex urban challenges. Though community voices are part of municipal decision-making, planners and public health professionals need tools to better integrate their perspectives for desired changes (what) in the successful implementation of built environment programs and i...

Background : Closed-source software for processing and analyzing accelerometer data provides little to no information about the algorithms used to transform acceleration data into physical activity indicators. Recently, an algorithm was developed in MATLAB that replicates the frequently used proprietary ActiLife activity counts. The aim of this sof...

Over the past few months, transit agencies across Canada have been rushed to implement a range of strategies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with no standardized guidelines to direct their efforts. This study explores the initial response of transit agencies serving the 25 most populous Canadian cities by understanding the distinct types of r...

Walkability is a term that describes various aspects of the built and social environment and has been associated with physical activity and public health. Walkability is subjective and although multiple definitions of walkability exist, there is no single agreed upon definition. Road networks are integral parts of mobility and should be an importan...

Walkability is a term that describes various aspects of the built and social environment and has been associated with physical activity and public health. Walkability is subjective and although multiple definitions of walkability exist, there is no single agreed upon definition. Road networks are integral parts of mobility and should be an importan...

Built environment interventions have the potential to improve population health and reduce health inequities. The objective of this paper is to present the first wave of the INTErventions, Research, and Action in Cities Team (INTERACT) cohort studies in Victoria, Vancouver, Saskatoon, and Montreal, Canada. We examine how our cohorts compared to Can...

In response to growing levels of social isolation and loneliness in cities, the promotion of social connectedness has come to the forefront of urban health, sustainability, and resiliency agendas. Despite policy attention locally and internationally, social connectedness is not consistently defined, conceptualized, or measured in population health...

Objective Multisectoral partnerships (MPs) are increasingly viewed as an excellent strategy for promoting population health, although the Canadian evidence on MPs remains scant. The objective of this research was to identify enablers and barriers to multisectoral collaboration across three MPs (focused on food systems, urban development, and active...

Background: Researchers, policy makers, and urban planners require tools to better understand the complex relationship between gentrification and health. The Gentrification, Urban Interventions and Equity (GENUINE) tool is an open-access, map-based tool that allows users to explore measures of gentrification for Canadian cities and incorporate the...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0246419.].

Walkability is a term that describes various aspects of the built and social environment and has been associated with physical activity and public health. Walkability is subjective and although multiple definitions of walkability exist, there is no single agreed upon definition. Road networks are integral parts of mobility and should be an importan...

Objectives This study’s objective was to examine whether commercial wearable devices could accurately predict lying, sitting and varying intensities of walking and running. Methods We recruited a convenience sample of 49 participants (23 men and 26 women) to wear three devices, an Apple Watch Series 2, a Fitbit Charge HR2 and iPhone 6S. Participan...

There is little understanding of how the built environment shapes activity behaviours in children over different seasons. This study sought to establish how seasonal weather patterns, in a given year in a mid-western Canadian city, affect sedentary time (SED) in youth and how the relationship between season and SED are moderated by the built enviro...

Objectives Decision-makers are increasingly requesting economic analyses on transportation-related interventions, but health is often excluded as a determinant of value. We assess the health-related economic impact of bicycle infrastructure investments in three Canadian cities (Victoria, Kelowna and Halifax), comparing a baseline reference year (20...

Local transit accessibility measures are important tools used by planners to understand the effects of changes to public transit systems. Several local transit accessibility measures exist in the literature, however, it is not clear how these measures relate to public transit usage. Therefore, the aim of this study is to evaluate several transit ac...

The Geller typology, which categorizes the population into four types of bicyclists (strong and fearless, enthused and confident, interested but concerned, and no way no how) has gained considerable popularity amongst researchers and planners. One large U.S. study used a survey-derived approach to categorize respondents into Geller’s typology, and...

Background: Healthy communities can be supported through built environment interventions that redesign cities for improved health outcomes. Understanding the context of these interventions is critical for assessing how an intervention impacts population health; such context is often poorly documented. This study uses concept mapping to capture sta...

Smartphones and wearable devices are driving a boom in mobility data. We use data-driven tools for classifying movement data into five different travel modes (bicycle, walk, bus, motor vehicle and SkyTrain) in Vancouver and St. John's, Canada. Using data from a GPS-enabled smartphone app (Itinerum) combined with a wrist-worn accelerometer (GENEActi...

A docked public bicycle share program (PBSP) makes bicycles available to the public. There is limited evidence on the impact of PBSPs on safety. We estimated the impacts of implementing a PBSP on the likelihood of bicycle crashes using a difference in differences approach with repeated cross-sectional survey data (self-reported crashes) collected i...

Cities are promoting bicycling for transportation as an antidote to increased traffic congestion, obesity and related health issues, and air pollution. However, both research and practice have been stalled by lack of data on bicycling volumes, safety, infrastructure, and public attitudes. New technologies such as GPS-enabled smartphones, crowdsourc...

BACKGROUND Public health research studies often rely on population-based participation and draw on various recruitment methods to establish samples. Increasingly researchers are turning to web-based recruitment tools. However, few studies detail traditional and online recruitment efforts in terms of costs and potential biases. OBJECTIVE Our object...

Background: Public health research studies often rely on population-based participation and draw on various recruitment methods to establish samples. Increasingly researchers are turning to web-based recruitment tools. However, few studies detail traditional and online recruitment efforts in terms of costs and potential biases. Objective: Our ob...

The planet is rapidly urbanizing, the need for actionable evidence to guide the design of cities that help (not hinder) our health has never felt more urgent. One essential component of healthy city design is improving neighborhood conditions in previously disinvested areas. To ensure equitable city design, policy makers, city planners, health prac...

BACKGROUND Consumer-wearable activity trackers are small electronic devices that record fitness and health-related measures. The purpose of this systematic review is to examine the validity and reliability of commercial wearables in measuring step count, heart rate, and energy expenditure. OBJECTIVE To outline and summarize information about the v...

Background: Consumer-wearable activity trackers are small electronic devices that record fitness and health-related measures. Objective: The purpose of this systematic review was to examine the validity and reliability of commercial wearables in measuring step count, heart rate, and energy expenditure. Methods: We identified devices to be incl...

Background There is considerable promise for using commercial wearable devices for measuring physical activity at the population level. The objective of this study was to examine whether commercial wearable devices could accurately predict lying, sitting, and intensity level of other activities in a lab-based protocol. Methods We recruited a conven...

Introduction Launched in 2015, Philadelphia's (Pennsylvania, USA) bikeshare program was the first to specifically target lower-income and minority residents. Objective We describe the design, measures and baseline characteristics of a bikeshare evaluation designed to assess within-person changes in physical activity levels (PA) and focused particu...

Understanding how humans use and consume space by comparing stratified groups, either through observation or controlled study, is key to designing better spaces, cities, and policies. GPS data traces provide detailed movement patterns of individuals but can be difficult to interpret due to the scale and scope of the data collected. For actionable i...

Understanding how humans use and consume space by comparing stratified groups, either through observation or controlled study, is key to designing better spaces, cities, and policies. GPS data traces provide detailed movement patterns of individuals but can be difficult to interpret due to the scale and scope of the data collected. For actionable i...

Background: Despite rapid expansion of public bicycle share programs (PBSP), there are limited evaluations of the population-level impacts of these programs on cycling, leaving uncertainty as to whether these programs lead to net health gains at a population level or attract those that already cycle and are sufficiently physically active. Our obje...

Bicyclist categorizations have been developed to sort individuals into distinct groups based on shared traits, which can help researchers and practitioners understand complex patterns of bicycling behavior. Previous categorizations have focused on bicycle facility comfort, seasonal patterns of use, and behaviors and attitudes, but not on readiness...

We discuss the future of activity space and health research in the context of a recently published systematic review. Our discussion outlines a number of elements for reflection among the research community. We need to think beyond activity space and reconceptualize exposure in era of high volume, high precision location data. We need to develop st...

Background. Implementing food stores in deprived neighborhoods to improve access to healthy food is a debated topic. Aims. To uncover important contributors to the closure of grocery store interventions in urban food deserts. Method. We systematically reviewed both peer-reviewed and gray literature for publications on the failure of grocery store i...

Introduction Promoting active transportation is an important public health objective. Limited research has examined the potential of interventions that highly constrain transportation and their potential impact on cycling. From November 1-7th, 2016, Philadelphia's transit workers went on strike, stopping all transit services in the city. Methods W...

Safety concerns are a primary deterrent to bicycling. Bicycle infrastructure is both preferred and safer for bicycling. In this paper, we examine the association between availability of bicycle infrastructure and perceptions of bicycling safety amongst over 3000 bicyclists living in six large Canadian and US cities. In three repeat cross-sectional...

Devices equipped with sensors to track mobility, such as through Global Position Systems (GPS) and accelerometery, are increasingly being used for research. Following Canadian, US, and International guidelines there is a need to give special consideration when conducting research with vulnerable populations. This paper examines specific ethical con...

Background: Active travel for utilitarian purposes contributes to total physical activity and may help counter the obesity epidemic. However, the evidence linking active travel and individual-level body weight is equivocal. Statistical modeling that accounts for spatial autocorrelation and unmeasured spatial predictors has not yet used to explore...

Background Urban form interventions can result in positive and negative impacts on physical activity, social participation, and well-being, and inequities in these outcomes. Natural experiment studies can advance our understanding of causal effects and processes related to urban form interventions. The INTErventions, Research, and Action in Cities...

BACKGROUND: Public bicycle share programs in many cities are used by a small segment of the population. To better understand the market for public bicycle share, this study examined the socio-demographic and transportation characteristics of current, potential, and unlikely users of a public bicycle share program and identified specific motivators...

Collection of GPS data is becoming a standard experimental method for studies ranging from public health interventions to studying the browsing behavior of large non-human mammals. However, the millions of records collected in these studies do not lend themselves to traditional geographic analysis. Standardized feature sets likely to produce distin...

Public bicycle share programs have been implemented in cities around the world to encourage bicycling.However, there are limited evaluations of the impact of these programs on bicycling at the population level. This study examined the impact of a public bicycle share program on bicycling amongst residents of Vancouver, BC. Using an online panel, we...

The impacts of active transportation planning on equity are often overlooked, potentially leading to disparities in who receives benefits of infrastructure investment. This study examined income inequalities in spatial access to bicycling infrastructure in three mid-sized Canadian cities: Victoria and Kelowna (British Columbia), and Halifax (Nova S...

Objective: The objective of this study was to examine the association between area level deprivation and vehicle collisions resulting in either property damage or injury. Methods: A multilevel observational study was conducted using the 2000 to 2010 Saskatchewan Traffic Accident Information System (TAIS) (n = 72,234) and 2006 Census data at the...

Introduction Bicycling is promoted as a transportation and population health strategy globally. Yet bicycling has low uptake in North America (1%–2% of trips) compared with European bicycling cities (15%–40% of trips) and shows marked sex and age trends. Safety concerns due to collisions with motor vehicles are primary barriers. To attract the broa...

The volume and velocity of data are growing rapidly and big data analytics are being applied to these data in many fields. Population and public health researchers may be unfamiliar with the terminology and statistical methods used in big data. This creates a barrier to the application of big data analytics. The purpose of this glossary is to defin...