The Challenge
With more people sitting for the majority of the day, it is important to encourage people of all ages to not only be more physically active, but also understand the reason as to why this is important. Ensuring physical activity is a daily habit is recognised as a big challenge, especially for children who do not have full control of their behaviours. However, embedding physical activity to the daily lives of children, could lead to a generational shift on daily movement.
It is vitally important to enhance the health and wellbeing through the promotion of physical activity.
Professor Kelly Mackintosh, Professor Melitta McNarry and a team of researchers gave local children, activity monitors to wear for a week. The children continued their normal daily activities, which were now being recorded. The data was then uploaded, and a 3D model was printed and given to each child. The tangible nature of this data gave important insights to the children on their daily movements.
For the researchers, this changed their approach from ensuring novel, highly sensitive data capture, to ensuring a simply display of information to the population to aid with understanding. Until people understand what they need to do, no intervention is likely to be effective.
