JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

For decades, global guidance for sedentary behaviour and sleep has primarily been informed by studies that relied on self-report questionnaires to assess behaviours. However, it is widely recognised that self-reported data suffer from numerous limitations, including recall and social desirability biases, as well as poor validity and precision. The Prospective Physical Activity, Sitting and Sleep consortium (ProPASS) is a large international collaboration of cohort studies with research-grade wearables data designed to address these challenges. The ProPASS consortium looks to advance our understanding of the associations of free-living physical activity, posture (sitting, standing), and sleep with major health and non-communicable disease outcomes. In this editorial, we provide an overview of the first ProPASS scientific outputs including its growth in recent years; key advancements towards unified wearables methodologies; the ProPASS data resources, and how these will be made available to the global research community. To assist future analogous initiatives, we also share the key challenges ProPASS has encountered and discuss mitigation strategies.