Virtual exercise
IN THE WAKE OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC, Children’s Mercy Kansas City (Mo.) launched a program to deliver physical education to local elementary school students remotely.
The research project, still in its early stages, seeks to encourage kids to engage in physical activity while at home and to help Children’s Mercy better understand the role wearables can play in doing so.
“School is a huge source of kids’ physical activity,” said Jordan Carlson, associate professor of pediatrics at the Center for Children’s Healthy Lifestyles & Nutrition at Children’s Mercy, citing a 2015 study he led that found roughly half of kids’ daily physical activity comes from time spent at school. Carlson is leading the project, which is dubbed the Stay Active Program. “With the impact of the pandemic, and kids not physically being at school … we know physical activity is taking a huge hit,” he said.
Children’s Mercy in the fall launched the research project—funded by a grant from the Claire Giannini Fund— in fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms in six schools. Stay Active involves an instructor from Children’s Mercy delivering physical activity lessons via video conferencing twice a week, with short sessions of five to 10 minutes. To encourage kids to exercise, the program also supplies participating classrooms with smartwatch fitness trackers from Garmin, which students wear to track daily step counts and minutes of physical activity. Parents get an email newsletter twice a month with advice on encouraging their kids to be active during the pandemic.
Garmin donated 250 smartwatches for the program; so far, roughly 75 devices have been distributed to participating students. The smartwatches retail for around $80.
Students’ data is sent to a Garmin mobile app for parents to view, as well as to Children’s Mercy, as part of the health system’s research and to inform automatic pre-scripted text messages that are sent to parents. Physical education teachers can also request to see aggregated class-level data, but not information on individual children, Carlson said.
Carlson said it’s a voluntary program, and kids have seemed excited, in part because they keep the device. “Are kids going to wear it for the long term? Are they going to keep wearing it across the semester?” he said, citing examples of questions his research seeks to answer. “Those are questions that we don’t have much experience with so far.”