The 7th Nordic Seminar on Technical Measurements of Physical Activity & Sedentary Behaviour, Uppsala 19-21 March 2025 (PASB)

Welcome to The 7th Nordic Seminar on Technical Measurements of Physical Activity & Sedentary Behaviour,
Uppsala 19-21 March 2025

‘The wise creator of everything, who has decided that many actions in this world should be accomplished by movement, has adapted it to the different living creatures so that they are maintained through just right movements and weakened by too much, but by permanent inactivity they die, as if by a natural punishment.’ Carl von Linné in the thesis ‘Motus Polychrestus’ (‘The benefits of movement’), 1763

Linnégarden, Carl von Linné

Linné (who was a professor in Uppsala) obviously knew already 250 years ago that both too little and too much movement was bad for health, but he did not know how the ‘just right’ combination of activity and recovery looked, let alone the optimal temporal structure of this combination within a day and between days.

Today we have access to wearable tools for measuring physical behaviors that Linné could only dream about, but we still don’t know how a ‘just right’ composition looks. So these are some of the themes of the present 7th Nordic Seminar on Technical Measurements of Physical Activity and Sedentary Behavior: How can we approach a ‘just right’ composition of behaviors, including the temporal structure within and between days and the intensities of activities? Does ‘just right’ differ between work and leisure? What needs to be considered when measuring and analyzing physical behaviors in different populations and different contexts? How can we quantify physical behaviors using affordable, valid and reliable measurement methods? How can the data be used in practice, and who will use them?

At the Seminar, Nordic researchers devoted to technical measurements of physical activity and inactivity can share knowledge, foster collaborations, and exchange ideas. The seminar has a multidisciplinary profile and welcomes participants from several disciplines including public health, physiology, sports sciences, clinical sciences, epidemiology, computer science and engineering. The Seminar is a strictly in-person event and will include time for social interactions and networking.

The six previous seminars have been organized in Copenhagen, Gothenburg, Trondheim and Turku. The present seminar will take place in Uppsala, jointly organized and hosted by the Department of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Uppsala University and the Department of Occupational Health, Psychology and Sports Sciences, University of Gävle.

Uppsala has changed since the days of Linné (even if his garden remains); today it’s a modern city, known, for its two universities, rich cultural life, beautiful landscape and for being the seat for the archbishop of the Church of Sweden. Read more