There is a growing body of research into the total amount and patterns of sitting, standing and stepping in office-based workers and few studies using objectively measured sitting and standing. Understanding these patterns may identify daily times opportune for interventions to displace sitting with activity. A sample of office-based workers (n = 164) residing in England were fitted with thigh-worn ActivPal accelerometers and devices were worn 24 hours a day for five consecutive days, always including Saturday and Sunday and during bathing and sleeping. Daily amounts and patterns of time spent sitting, standing, stepping and step counts and frequency of sit/stand transitions, recorded by the ActivPal accelerometer, were reported. Total sitting/standing time was similar on weekdays (10.6/4.1 hrs) and weekends (10.6/4.3 hrs). Total step count was also similar over weekdays (9682 ± 3872) and weekends (9518 ± 4615). The highest physical activity levels during weekdays were accrued at 0700 to 0900, 1200 to 1400, and 1700 to 1900; and during the weekend at 1000 to 1700. During the weekday the greatest amount of sitting was accrued at 0900 to 1200, 1400 to 1700, and 2000 to 2300, and on the weekend between 1800 and 2300. During the weekday the greatest amount of standing was accrued between 0700 and 1000 and 1700 and 2100, and on the weekend between 1000 and 1800. On the weekday the highest number of sit/stand transitions occurred between 0800 to 0900 and remained consistently high until 1800. On the weekend, the highest number occurred between 1000 to 1400 and 1900 to 2000. Office based-workers demonstrate high levels of sitting during both the working week and weekend. Interventions that target the working day and the evenings (weekday and weekend) to displace sitting with activity may offer most promise for reducing population levels of sedentary behaviour and increasing physical activity levels, in office-based workers residing in England.

Several industry-led initiatives in various countries demonstrate a new interest in wellbeing and buildings. This paper adopts a scoping review method aiming to establish the most prevalent and insightful definitions and dimensions of wellbeing in buildings applied in the recent published literature. The paper adopts a two-step method for identifying and categorizing the conceptual approaches to wellbeing encountered in the current literature. First, an overview is presented of the term ‘wellbeing’ and its development over time. Second, the broad wellbeing categories identified are further refined and complemented via a deductive approach, drawing the final set of conceptual themes informed by the papers reviewed in this study. Nine themes were identified, two of which deductively emerged from the papers included in this study: environmental satisfaction/comfort and cognitive performance/productivity. The findings emphasize the heterogeneity of conceptual approaches to research concerning ‘wellbeing in buildings’, an ambiguity between wellbeing outcomes or determinants, and the need for greater clarity on the relative contributions of different wellbeing dimensions to overall individual or population wellbeing. Based on these findings, future work could be carried out to provide guidance on how to evaluate claims of evidence-based building design which foster individual or population wellbeing.

Economic, physical, built, cultural, learning, social and service environments have a profound effect on lifelong health. However, policy thinking about health research is dominated by the ‘biomedical model’ which promotes medicalisation and an emphasis on diagnosis and treatment at the expense of prevention. Prevention research has tended to focus on ‘downstream’ interventions that rely on individual behaviour change, frequently increasing inequalities. Preventive strategies often focus on isolated leverage points and are scattered across different settings. This paper describes a major new prevention research programme that aims to create City Collaboratory testbeds to support the identification, implementation and evaluation of upstream interventions within a whole system city setting. Prevention of physical and mental ill-health will come from the cumulative effect of multiple system-wide interventions. Rather than scatter these interventions across many settings and evaluate single outcomes, we will test their collective impact across multiple outcomes with the goal of achieving a tipping point for better health. Our focus is on early life (ActEarly) in recognition of childhood and adolescence being such critical periods for influencing lifelong health and wellbeing.

Although the built environment (BE) is important for children’s health, there is little consensus about which features are most important due to differences in measurement and outcomes across disciplines. This meta-narrative review was undertaken by a multi-disciplinary team of researchers to summarise ways in which the BE is measured, and how this links to children’s health. A structured search of four databases across the relevant disciplines retrieved 108 relevant references. The most commonly addressed health-related outcomes were active travel, physical activity and play, and obesity. Many studies used objective (GIS and street audits) or standardised subjective (perceived) measurements of the BE. However, there was a wide variety, and sometimes inconsistency, in their definition and use. There were clear associations between the BE and children’s health. Objective physical activity and self-reported active travel, or obesity, were positively associated with higher street connectivity or walkability measures, while self-reported physical activity and play had the strongest association with reduced street connectivity, indicated by quieter, one-way streets. Despite the high heterogeneity found in BE measures and health outcomes, the meta-narrative approach enabled us to identify ten BE categories that are likely to support children’s health and be protective against some non-communicable disease risk factors. Future research should implement consistent BE measures to ensure key features are explored. A systems approach will be particularly relevant for addressing place-based health inequalities, given potential unintended health consequences of making changes to the BE.

Little is known of the patterns of physical activity, standing and sitting by office workers. However, insight into these behaviours is of growing interest, notably in regard to public health priorities to reduce non-communicable disease risk factors associated with high levels of sitting time and low levels of physical activity. With the advent and increasing availability of indoor tracking systems it is now becoming possible to build detailed pictures of the usage of indoor spaces. This paper reports initial results of indoor tracking used in conjunction with the ActivPAL activity monitoring device. In this paper we give an overview of the usage of the tracking system and its installation and illustrate some of the resultant data. We also provide preliminary results that investigate the relationship between location, light physical activity and sitting in a small sample of office workers (n=33) from two separate office environments in order to demonstrate the relevance and explanatory power of the technique.