New techniques and issues in assessing walking behavior and its contexts

In the first section of this article, we discuss the metabolic responses to walking by describing the economy of walking during different locomotion velocities. Gender, weight status, and growth effects on metabolic responses to walking are reviewed. In the second section, we examine the use of technology to assess walking patterns and behavior in the community. We use an engineering approach for understanding how to measure objects that move, and these methods are used to assess walking used in transportation. In the third part of the paper, we summarize self-report methods that have been used to assess walking behavior and highlight the strengths and weaknesses of these methods. We illustrate how self-report methods are used to quantify walking behavior in the surveillance systems that are now widely used to ascertain walking prevalence and temporal changes in different populations. In the final section, we discuss ways of measuring the walkability of neighborhoods and the community to understand the influence of the built environment on walking behavior.