2026

McVeigh, Joanne; Kulmala, Janne; Micklesfield, Lisa; Pang, Bingyan

The rapid uptake of wearables over the past 25 years has been transformative, enabling unprecedented insights into movement behaviors (physical activity, sedentary behavior, and sleep) and their determinants across diverse populations. In 2025, the World Health Organization signaled a major shift by calling for future physical activity guidelines to be informed by device-measured data. This challenging, but highly supported ambition raises a critical question for the research community: How should harmonized movement behavior measures be interpreted when applied across cohorts with markedly different lived and geographic contexts?