I'm not exactly sure why, but I was pleased to learn that I walk like an environmental field scientist. I have none of his or her expertise and spend far too much time indoors, but a gadget called the StepWatch seems to link us. Not only did the device count the number of steps I took over 10 days, it also tracked and measured the frequency and intensity of my movement. And it gave me a picture much like the scientist's.

Created by a Seattle company, Cyma, the device is used in rehabilitation, where clinicians, medical researchers and insurance providers seek more objective understanding of a person's ability, patterns and willingness to move around (or stay put).

With the recent emphasis on walking as a path to health, I strapped the device to an ankle. It is feather-light and devoid of that ticking sound you often hear when walking with a standard pedometer.

The device is priced out of the consumer range. It is geared, right now, to help medical professionals who want accurate reads of whether patients are following advice, whether that be to walk more intensely or to sit still to let injuries rest.

When I returned the StepWatch to the Cyma office near the Wedgwood neighborhood, research coordinator Linda Laing plugged it into a PC docking station, producing a two-page report. The information provided a detailed description: the number of steps, the minutes per day I moved at high, moderate and low pace and the percent of time in each of those categories. It also produced a bar graph showing my "maximum sustained" and "accumulated peak" efforts.

The accumulated-peak data showed the average step rate for the highest 30 minutes of the day; the sustained activity chart showed my average step rate in blocks of one, five, 20 and 60 minutes. This enables researchers or clinicians to check each window of movement to see the subject's time and intensity at each stage.

The report also gave me a daily record and overall average and provided a minute-by-minute, step-by-step graph of my steps and pace. For instance, on a very active Thursday, I was walking a step per second by 8:30 in the morning and kept it up for an hour. On a lazy Tuesday, I took only about half as many steps, moved slowly and didn't even sustain that.

By the end of the trial, I began to keep notes of my days so I could compare my movement with decisions I made, as well as the whims of real life. I wasn't trying to skew the results, but my activity picked up considerably.

Going through the process, though, inspired me to think more about walking. I couldn't argue with the numbers and graphs. I felt good about the thick black blobs of activity and sheepish about the periods of no movement or wimpy 10 steps-per-minute activity.

The extent to which a person is able and willing to move around the world is often an indicator of his or her condition. Generally, we're advised to walk for about 30 minutes and take 10,000 steps each day. But knowing pace and patterns was especially helpful.

Kim Coleman, director of research and clinical applications for the small company, showed me the work-time movement of people from other occupations. A professional gardener logged a fury of brisk movement for six solid hours. A nurse was walking and stopping and walking and stopping for 13 hours. A college student walked briskly and often in the morning, barely moved mid-day, and sporadically through the evening. A waiter took 9,600 steps in five hours of work by constantly moving.

The people from these occupations also had very different measures of time spent at various paces. On average, though, people in the study (all healthy) walked 30 minutes at "high," 95 minutes at moderate, four hours at low, and 17 hours of not moving at all.

Which brings me to the environmental field scientist. Both of us move and stop, move and stop, all workday long. He or she is continually moving to the next subject and then studying. I'm not sure what my excuse should be yet.

The company says its device measures real-world behavior and long-term data that is used to measure outcomes, document results of rehabilitation and aid health-related research. The original research version of the StepWatch was developed in the mid-1990s at a Seattle-based not-for-profit prosthetics research lab with participation by the University of Washington.

Cyma considers accuracy to be the StepWatch's greatest asset, saying independent studies have shown it to be 98 percent correct.

Richard Seven is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff writer. He can be reached at rseven@seattletimes.com.