Discussion: Accelerometers

There have been articles in the press recently that not only is dedicated exercise important for good health, but also general movement through out the day. There was an article which recently compared people who exercised but had sedentary jobs were more at risk for cardiac disease than people who did not have a sedentary job but moved around quite a bit in the day. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/12/the-hazar...
I have been trying to be more active during the day like standing up frequently, taking 10 minute walks 2 or 3 times a day, etc., but it would be interesting to have a more quatitative measurement of my activity on a day to day basis.
Would an accelerometer measure this, and if so, any recommendations?

Accelerometers measure acceleration - changes in speed. It would record something when you got up, but not if you were walking for 10 minutes at constant speed. A pedometer might be able to give you a number relative to general activity.

Depends on where you put the accelerometer...

I recently saw a Texas Instruments EZ-430 Chronos programmable watch with a heart rate monitor and an onboard 3-axis accelerometer (and more). I hear that programming it is non-trivial, but I'm not sure. Someone might have written something already---I don't know a good place to look for that.

I'm thinking about buying one for some oddball projects.

{Edit: an article showing the accelerometers being used (on the 2nd and 3rd pages).}

... and no change in speed can be as informative as a change in speed.

@cedarcreek: I've got one of those and have been working on programming the eZ430 Chronos for "Automatic Map reading detection" along with some other people by storing the accelerometer data. Two problems ; only 8 kB of memory, i.e. you can not store raw data but must do processing on board and there is a bug we haven't managed to solve yet with the watch randomly hanging. Still it is a nice watch.

For the application asked for there should be several ready-made solutions, though. Haven't got a link handy, but I've found several when searching for alternatives to the Chronos for my application.

The Polar FA20 would work for Evancuster's use.

This might do it (and a lot more) when it is being released
http://mybasis.com/