APP AIMS TO GET KIDS MORE ACTIVE

Results from the Health Survey for England (HSE) show that in 2014 an astonishing 31.2 per cent of children aged 2 to 15 were classed as either overweight or obese. The World Health Organization recommends that kids should do at least one hour of physical activity every day, but in a hand-held, screen-obsessed digital world this can be a battle. ReimaGO aims to counter that by offering an additional incentive for children to get active.

A collaboration between Nordic clothing brand Reima and Finnish precision instrument manufacturer Suunto, the ReimaGO system includes a wearable motion sensor and a collection of kids’ clothing featuring an integrated pocket for attaching the sensor. The device is not a GPS tracker – so it won’t tell parents where their children are or how far they’ve travelled. Nor will it monitor heart rate or count calories. Instead, it’s purely about measuring the duration and intensity of physical activity.

The collected data can then be transferred to the smartphone app via Bluetooth. To provide encouragement and an incentive for children, the app features a fun virtual character that progresses up a scoreboard in exchange for ‘rewards’. Parents can use the same app to track the level of intensity and duration of their child’s activity and compare day-by-day and ‘actual vs target’ levels.

For many kids, the wonders of the world outside are enough on their own to prise them away from their games consoles. But for those who need a little more encouragement (or parents who want to see just how much exercise their offspring are getting), ReimaGO joins the Pokémon Go phenomenon, which – while easy to be cynical about – is at least encouraging kids to get up and about. And anything that encourages 21st century children to be fitter and healthier can only be a good thing, even if it is reliant on the same smartphones that so often render them immobile.