Lina Engelen

• PhD
• Senior Researcher at The University of Sydney

Indoor Positioning Systems (IPS) appear to offer great potential to study the movement and interaction of people and their working environment, including office workplaces. But little is known about appropriate durations for data collection. In this study, location observations collected from 24 office workers on a 1220 m² office floor over a 3-mon...

Office workers spend much of their working day sitting or standing still, which can have dramatic impacts on their health. The physical environment has long been regarded as influencing people's behaviour, including how much and how often they move. Developing a deeper understanding of relationships between specific spatial and environmental attrib...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to map and describe findings from research conducted in workspaces designed to support activity-based working (ABW) over the past 10 years (2010–2020) with a view of informing post-COVID workplaces of the positive and negative attributes of ABW. Design/methodology/approach Scopus was used as the search engine f...

Although people are living longer, well-being and quality of life (QoL) are not guaranteed. The built environment is recognized as influencing health outcomes across lifespans. This narrative review takes a cross-disciplinary approach to understand the current evidence of the relationship between design, healthy ageing and QoL. Diverse methods were...

A key to the development of more effective interventions to promote movement and reduce physical inactivity in office workplaces may be to measure and locate individual's spatial movement. Using an activity space estimation method, high resolution location data collected from 15 office workers over 12 days were used to estimate and analyse the loca...

Prolonged periods of stationary behaviour, a common occurrence in many office workplaces, is linked with a range of physical disorders. Investigating the physical context of this behaviour may be a key to developing effective interventions. This study aimed to estimate and locate the stationary and movement behaviours of office workers (n = 10) by...

Office workers can spend significant periods of time being stationary whilst at work, with potentially serious health consequences. The development of effective health interventions could be aided by a greater understanding of the location and environmental context in which this stationary behaviour occurs. Real time location systems (RTLS) potenti...

Objective: Physical activity has been commonly measured as time spent in bouts of at least 10 minutes, however, each minute of physical activity achieved in a day is now regarded as beneficial. This study aims to compare differences in total time spent walking in a week to time spent walking in 10‐minute bouts over the same seven‐day period. Method...

Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) reflects a building's performance in relation to the health, comfort and wellbeing of its occupants. Conventional IEQ measurement strategies fail to capture spatial or temporal variations in IEQ. Recent technological developments in IEQ monitoring and occupant location tracking provide opportunities to monitor IEQ...

Purpose In the rise of offices designed to support activity-based working (ABW), parts of industry have fully transitioned to open-plan environments and then later to unassigned seating, whereas other parts, such as tertiary education, are still in the process of moving away from individual offices. There are a few relevant studies to understand ho...

Active design is an emerging concept to incorporate physical activity into daily life through thoughtful design, and is often implemented in new building designs. It is, however, not known what evidence base there is to support the claims. Through this systematic review, the current evidence for active design was investigated. Seven databases were...

The period from birth to 12 years is crucial in a child's development and can significantly impact future educational success, resilience and participation in society. Health and Wellbeing in Childhood provides readers with a comprehensive introduction to a wide range of topics and issues in health and wellbeing education, including child safety, b...

Objectives To examine the relationship between school playground size and total physical activity (PA), fitness and fundamental movement skills (FMS) of primary school students. Design Cross-sectional ecological analysis. Setting 43 primary schools in New South Wales, Australia. Participants Data were from 5238 students, aged 5 to 12 years, part...

1. The case for physical activity 1.1 Co-benefits of physical activity – health, social, economic, environmental and other societal gains from building a more active nation 1.2 Are Australians active? Prevalence, trends and correlates of meeting physical activity guidelines 2. Whole-of-systems approaches 2.1 Whole-of-systems approaches to physi...

Background: High levels of sitting are associated with increased risk of adverse health outcomes, including chronic disease. Extensive sitting at work is common, hence organisations should provide options to employees to reduce prolonged sitting. Objective: To assess the efficacy and acceptability of a co-designed intervention to increase standi...

Becoming an autonomttous adult includes understanding consequences associated with risks. The aim of this study was to compare parents of children with and without disability to identify any differences in promoting manageable risk-taking. Data were collected from parents of typically developing children and parents of children with developmental d...

Active travel can support the achievement of recommended levels of physical activity. Monitoring travel behavior of university students and staff provides a useful insight into patterns of regional travel and population level changes in physical activity. This study sought to evaluate current travel and physical activity behaviors in a university p...

Objective: While stair climbing could contribute to daily physical activity goals, and there is potential for broad population reach, most stair climbing interventions are single-component and have limited effect. Methods: In a longitudinal quasi-experimental study, a 1-month multi-component intervention, followed by 6 months with point-of-choic...

Studying the workplace often involves using observational, self-report recall, or focus group tools, which all have their established advantages and disadvantages. There is, however, a need for a readily available, low-invasive method that can provide longitudinal, repeated, and concurrent in-the-moment information to understand the workplace well....

Introduction: With two thirds of adults in paid employment and one third physically inactive, workplaces are an important setting for promoting more physical activity. We explored the attitudes and practices of employees and managers from different industries towards sitting and moving at work, to inform the development of acceptable solutions for...

As part of a cluster randomized controlled trial (Bundy et al., 2017), the after school-hours activities of 5-7 year old children were recorded by parents and other adult carers on four consecutive weekdays between 3:30pm-7:00pm. Records of time use showed most time was spent indoors in activities involving low levels of physical activity. The most...

As part of a cluster randomized controlled trial (Bundy et al., 2017), the after school-hours activities of 5-7 year old children were recorded by parents and other adult carers on four consecutive weekdays between 3:30pm-7:00pm. Records of time use showed most time was spent indoors in activities involving low levels of physical activity. The most...

Based on research conducted as part of the Sydney Playground Project, this paper provides an exploratory investigation of the perspectives of girls relating to the ideal school playground experience, and whether their perspectives are influenced by a loose-parts playground intervention. The focus is on the play behaviours of 22 girls aged 8–10 year...

This study aimed to explore the trend in population levels, as well as the correlates, of occupational and leisure sitting time in full-time employed Australian adults between 2007 and 2015. We used data from the 2007/08, 2011/12 and 2014/15 Australian Health Surveys, in which nationally representative samples of the Australian population were inte...

Increasingly, people are collecting detailed personal activity data from commercial trackers. Such data should be able to give important insights about their activity levels. However, people do not wear or carry tracking devices all day, every day and this means that tracker data is typically incomplete. This paper aims to provide a systematic way...

Numerous claims have been made about the benefits of activity-based working (ABW) on workers’ health and work performance. Yet, it is unclear if these claims are proven. This systematic review aims to establish whether there is an evidence base for the effects of ABW on health, work performance and perceptions of the work environment. Eight databas...

Eating is a routine, but very important, process of obtaining the nutrients we need with the added benefit of appreciation and enjoyment of food. The way we eat food and the processes taking place in the mouth while eating are highly complex, but they are nothing we think about much as we go about our daily lives. However, there are multiple intera...

Background: We assessed the effectiveness of a simple intervention for increasing children's physical activity, play, perceived competence/social acceptance, and social skills. Methods: A cluster-randomized controlled trial was conducted, in which schools were the clusters. Twelve Sydney (Australia) primary schools were randomly allocated to int...

Our aims were to examine the efficacy of a new observational instrument ‘System for Observing Outdoor Play’ for detecting changes in outdoor play and chart the use of recycled and repurposed materials in the school playground during the course of an intervention to increase outdoor play. Children from one Sydney primary school were observed (N = 11...

Objective: To examine trends in leisure time physical activity and inactivity in Australians aged 15 years or older from 1989 to 2011. Method: We used data from six Australian National Health Surveys conducted from 1989/90 to 2011/12 in which physical activity was assessed using comparable questions. Analyses examined trends in the prevalence of...

Objective: To examine the effects of different sit-stand protocols on work-time sitting and physical activity (PA) of office workers. Methods: Participants (n = 26, 77% women, mean age 42) were randomly allocated to usual sitting (control) or one of three sit-stand protocols (intervention) facilitated by height-adjustable workstations for a 4-we...

Issue addressed Only half of Australia's adult population is sufficiently physical active. One method thought to increase incidental physical activity at work is the use of stair‐promoting interventions. Stairs are readily available and stair climbing is considered vigorous physical activity. Motivational signs have been extensively and effectively...

Background: Active Design is a relatively new concept and evaluation on its effects on healthy behaviour is lacking. Objective: To investigate Active Design influence on workplace physical activity, sedentary behaviour, musculoskeletal complaints, and perceptions of the workplace and productivity. Methods: Participants (n = 118 adults) moving...

Objective: To examine the associations of physical activity (PA) and sitting time (sit) with cardio-metabolic diseases. Methods: Cross-sectional data from the Australian National Nutrition and Physical Activity Survey 2011-2012 (n=9,435) were used to classify adults into low and high risk groups based on their physical activity and sitting behav...

Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of an activity-based work (ABW) office environment on physical activity and sedentary behavior, work ability, and musculoskeletal discomfort. Methods: Eighty-eight office workers trialed ABW for 4 weeks. Accelerometer and self-reported outcomes were measured at baseline, end-interventio...

Issue addressed Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) involves repeated sampling of current behaviours and experiences in real‐time at random intervals. EMA is an innovative measurement method for program evaluation, using mobile technology (e.g. smartphones) to collect valid contextual health promotion data with good compliance. The present study...

This study evaluated the effects of sit-stand desks on workers' objectively and subjectively assessed sitting, physical activity, and productivity. This quasi-experimental study involved one intervention group (n = 16) and one comparison group ( n = 15). Participants were call center employees from two job-matched teams at a large telecommunication...

We tackle the important problem of understanding the accuracy of activity tracker data. To do this, we introduce the notions of daily and hourly adherence, key aspects of how consistently people wear trackers. We hypothesise that these measures provide a valuable means to address accuracy problems in population level activity tracking data. To test...

Background Prolonged sitting is associated with increased risk of chronic diseases. Workplace programs that aim to reduce sitting time (sit less) and increase physical activity (move more) have targeted desk-based workers in corporate and university settings with promising results. However, little is known about ‘move more, sit less’ programs for w...

Study design: Longitudinal observational cohort. Background: The impact of ankle fracture on physical activity and sitting time and the course of recovery of physical activity are unclear. Objectives: To assess the course of recovery of physical activity after ankle fracture and the extent to which this population may be less physically active...

Background: Occupying new, active design office buildings designed for health promotion and connectivity provides an opportunity to evaluate indoor environment effects on healthy behaviour, sedentariness and workplace perceptions. Aims: To determine if moving to a health-promoting building changed workplace physical activity, sedentary behaviour...

Transparency document

Flowchart showing participant progress through the Opt to Stand Study, Sydney, Australia. *AP = ActivPAL, AG = ActiGraph.

S1 and S2 showing the objective monitoring results using ActivPALs and ActiGraphs.

Australia has joined a growing number of nations which have evaluated the physical activity and sedentary behaviour status of their children. Australia received a 'D minus' in the first Active Healthy Kids Australia Physical Activity Report Card. An expert subgroup of the Australian Report Card Research Working Group iteratively reviewed available...

Physical inactivity is the fourth most important risk factor contributing to global non-communicable disease (NCD) deaths, occurring in high-, middle- and low-income countries. Building capacity in NCD prevention is a daunting task, and toward this end, an introductory open online course about physical activity (PA), exercise, and NCD prevention wa...

Background: Prolonged sitting is a specific occupational hazard in office workers. There is growing evidence that prolonged sitting is detrimental to metabolic health. The aim of this study is to determine whether providing office workers with education along with adjustable sit-stand workstations leads to reduction in sitting behavior.

Issue addressed: Workplace physical activity programs can motivate inactive target groups to increase daily activity levels, but it is important to determine their reach and impact. Methods: The Global Corporate Challenge (GCC) is a team-based program promoting pedometer-based self-monitoring to reach 10000 steps per day. Participants (n = 587)...

Objectives: To report 13-year trends in weight status of Australian Aboriginal children, and to describe weight-related behaviour in children in 2010, by Aboriginality. Design, setting and participants: Cross-sectional population surveys of children aged 5–16 years (n = 18 983) conducted in New South Wales schools in Term 1 of 1997, 2004 and 2010....

Objectives: To report 13-year trends in weight status of Australian Aboriginal children, and to describe weight-related behaviour in children in 2010, by Aboriginality. Design, setting and participants: Cross-sectional population surveys of children aged 5–16 years (n = 18 983) conducted in New South Wales schools in Term 1 of 1997, 2004 and 2010....

To promote healthy lifestyles, we need to understand more about the patterns of children's activities after school. Twenty 5-7 year old children and their parents participated in this study. Parents used 'real-time' diaries to report children's activities and contextual information at three randomly selected times per day, over 4 school days. Repor...

Background: Like many other countries, Australia is facing an inactivity epidemic. The purpose of the Australian 2014 Physical Activity Report Card initiative was to assess the behaviors, settings, and sources of influences and strategies and investments associated with the physical activity levels of Australian children and youth. Methods: A Re...

Children can spend substantial amounts of leisure time in sedentary activities, dominated by TV/screen time. However, objective real-time measurement of activities after school among young school children is seldom described. School children (n=246, aged 5-7 years, mean 6.0) randomly selected from 14 schools across Sydney, Australia and their paren...

This paper reports the results of risk reframing, an intervention to offer parents and educators a context for building new and complex perceptions of risk in children’s outdoor free play. Our objective was to alter these adults’ perceptions of risk to increase the sustainability of an innovative child-centred playground intervention. Qualitative d...

Increasing physical activity in young primary school children – it's child's play: A cluster randomised controlled trial, Preventive Medicine (2013), doi: 10.1016/j.ypmed.2013.02.007 This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscrip...

Objective: To explore the effects of an innovative school-based intervention for increasing physical activity. Methods: 226 children (5-7 years old) randomly selected from 12 Australian primary schools were recruited to a cluster randomised trial with schools randomly allocated to intervention or control conditions. The 13-week intervention comp...

After-school hours provide an opportunity for physical activity (PA). Parental perceptions influence children's PA. The aims were to: compare parents' perceptions of children's PA with objectively measured PA; shed light on PA during after-school hours; and compare two electronic devices for collecting data. Twenty parent-child dyads participated....

Introduction: This research was part of a larger study known as the Sydney Playground Project (SPP), which aims to increase physical activity and social skills in primary school children by means of a low-cost innovative playground intervention. For many children pure sports interventions are not the answer, hence this study engaged children's play...

Introduction to oral receptorsTasteMechanoreceptionNociceptionThermal perceptionOlfactionConcluding remarksReferences

This volume provides an overview of the latest research findings on the physics, physiology, and psychology of food oral consumption, as well as the experimental techniques available for food oral studies. Coverage includes the main physical and physiological functionalities of the mouth; the location and functionalities of various oral receptors;...

In the Westernised world, numerous children are overweight and have problems with bullying and mental health. One of the underlying causes for all three is postulated to be a decrease in outdoor free play. The aim of the Sydney Playground Project is to demonstrate the effectiveness of two simple interventions aimed to increase children's physical a...

In the oral cavity, the food is subjected to several mechanical and chemical processes. It is fractured by the teeth, diluted and broken down by saliva, heated or cooled by the ambient temperature of the mouth, formed into a bolus and finally swallowed. Numerous receptors in the oral cavity and nose respond to the initially ingested food and monito...

The production of a sufficient amount of saliva is indispensable for good chewing. In the present study, we examined the hypothesis that adding fluid to a food will facilitate the chewing process, especially for dry foods. The effect might be larger for subjects with relatively low salivary flow rates. Furthermore, adding fluids that contain mucins...

Saliva is expected to be of significance for the perception of food stimuli in the mouth. Mixing the food with saliva, including breakdown and dilution, is considered to be of large importance for semi-solids as these products are masticated without chewing. It is known that there are large variations in composition of saliva originating from diffe...

It has been generally assumed that fat is detected by its flavour and by its lubrication of the oral mucosa. A recent study reported a correlation of –.99 between perceived temperature of a product and its fat content. This was significantly higher than correlations of sensory scores for fat flavour, mouthfeel, and afterfeel. This suggested a third...

The production of sufficient saliva is indispensable for good chewing. Recent research has demonstrated that salivary flow rate has little influence on the swallowing threshold. The hypothesis examined in the present study was that adding fluids to foods will influence chewing physiology. Twenty subjects chewed on melba toast, cake, carrot, peanut...

Mastication is a sensory-motor activity aimed at the preparation of food for swallowing. It is a complex process involving activities of the facial, the elevator and suprahyoidal muscles, and the tongue. These activities result in patterns of rhythmic mandibular movements, food manipulation and the crushing of food between the teeth. Saliva facilit...

This review addresses a fundamental neuroscientific question in food perception: how multimodal features of food are integrated. Much research and conceptualization has emerged related to multisensory integration in vision, audition and somatosensation, while it remains poorly understood and researched within the chemical and mouth feel senses. Thi...

Practically all foods contain particles. It has been suggested that the presence of particles in food may affect the perception of sensory attributes. In the present study we investigated the effect of size and type (hardness and shape) of particles added to a CMC based vanilla custard dessert. The two types of particles included in the study were...

The urge to swallow food could be triggered by a threshold level in both food particle size and lubrication of the food bolus. Thus, both oral physiology and product characteristics may influence the swallowing threshold. We quantified the swallowing threshold in a group of 266 healthy adult subjects (age 42 +/- 12 years) by counting the number of...

We investigated how different parameters affect oral size perception of small particles of SiO2 and polystyrene particles of varying sizes (2–230 μm). Eighteen healthy subjects assessed the size of the particles by rubbing the sample between the tongue and the palate. The importance of size and type were studied by direct scaling and forced choice...

The role of salivary alpha-amylase in odour, flavour, and oral texture sensations was investigated in two studies in which the activity of salivary amylase present in the mouth of human subjects was either increased by presenting custards with added alpha-amylase or decreased by presenting custards with added acarbose, an amylase inhibitor. For sta...

The role of salivary α-amylase in odour, flavour, and oral texture sensations was investigated in two studies in which the activity of salivary amylase present in the mouth of human subjects was either increased by presenting custards with added α-amylase or decreased by presenting custards with added acarbose, an amylase inhibitor. For starch-base...

A trained panel of 19 subjects were asked to rate a number of sensory attributes of commercially available vanilla custard desserts. Stimuli were placed in plastic cups and were sampled using 11-mm-diameter straws. In total, 304 samples were weighed before and after sampling and the volume ingested was calculated. The subjects were categorized into...

The effects of nonoral sensations, such as visual texture and odor, on the size of the first bite were investigated in a series of studies using specially constructed food delivery cups with lower, from which custards were ingested ("ingested custard"), and upper, from which a custard was viewed and/or smelled ("upper custard") compartments. Ingest...

The size of a bolus determines how it will be manipulated in the mouth and swallowed. We hypothesized that mucosal sensitivity would be important for masticatory function. The accuracy of solid object size perception, spatial acuity, and food particle size reduction during mastication were measured in 22 healthy adults with/without topical anesthes...

We determined the salivary flow rate in 16 healthy subjects in rest and while chewing artificial and natural foods (Parafilm, Melba toast with and without margarine, and three different volumes of breakfast cake and cheese). We also determined the duration of a chewing cycle, the number of chewing cycles until swallowing, and the time until swallow...

This study examined the effect of oral and product temperature on the perception of texture and flavor attributes. A trained panel assessed 21 texture and flavor attributes in one high-fat and one low-fat product of two semi-solids: custard dessert and mayonnaise. The products were evaluated at 10, 22 or 35 degrees C in combination with oral temper...

The influence of bite size on sensory mouth- and afterfeel sensations was explored in two studies in which single bites of vanilla custard desserts were varied from 2 to 11 ml (study 1) and in which series of five bites of two different custard desserts were presented consecutively (study 2). In single bites, size affected perception of thickness,...

The effect of adding saliva or a saliva-related fluid (alpha-amylase solution and water) to custard prior to ingestion on the sensory ratings of odour, flavour and lip-tooth-, mouth- and after-feel sensations was investigated. Saliva had previously been collected from the subjects and each subject received his/her own saliva. Sixteen subjects from...