Key Concepts about Creating New Variables for Physical Activity Monitor Analyses

The PAXRAW data consists of a record for every minute of 7 days for each participant.  After selecting participants with acceptable accelerometer data, appending the 2003-2004 and 2005-2006 PAXRAW data and merging the age variable from the DEMO file, we are now ready to calculate summary variables that can be used in analyses.

For this tutorial, we use SAS macros to calculate the summary metrics. Although intermediate to advanced SAS skills are necessary to fully understand how macros work, we will point out where you can modify parameters in the provided SAS code, such as thresholds or bout length, to customize the code.