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Wearable Technologies to Improve Physical Activity, Sedentary Breaks, Training, Sleep, and Safety: The ECSS‐Wearable Technologies Special Interest Group Calls for Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Year: 2026

Type: review

Abstract: Wearable technologies ("wearables") are lightweight sensor-based devices that detect, analyze, and transmit physiological, biomechanical or environmental data, and are increasingly used across physical activity, sedentary behavior, athletic training, safety and sleep research. Applications include for example large-scale physical activity surveillance, ambulatory assessment, and real-time feedback during athletic training. Despite promising use cases such as heart rate variability-informed endurance training or gait retraining via biomechanical feedback, critical challenges remain. These include insufficient data quality, inadequately evaluated and inaccessible algorithms, limited interoperability between systems, difficulties translating sensor data into actionable insights, and insufficient wearable technology literacy among users. The Wearable Technologies Special Interest Group of the European College of Sport Science (ECSS-WT-SIG) identifies the need for interdisciplinary collaboration to address these challenges. Key priorities include developing regulatory frameworks, promoting standardized and open data infrastructure, improving wearable literacy of users, and conducting rigorous intervention studies under real-world conditions. The ECSS-WT-SIG calls on researchers, industry partners, NGOs, and other stakeholders to collectively advance the scientific and practical application of wearables in physical activity, sedentary behavior, training, sleep, and safety research.

Source: European Journal of Sport Science

DOI: 10.1002/ejsc.70270