Gadget Approach Fails to Motivate Teen Exercise

Teens don’t seem to be motivated by a system that requires them to wear a pedometer and sends them text messages to take part in physical activity, according to a recent study.

Kirsty H. Newton, a diabetes nurse specialist at University of Otago Wellington, in New Zealand, and colleagues assigned 78 teens to wear pedometers.

Over the course of the 12-year study, teens in the intervention group were sent a motivational text message in order to get them to take part in physical activity. Teens in the control group received standard care.

Newton’s team reported that teens in the intervention group didn’t appear to be significantly more or less motivated to exercise compared to teens in the control group.

The teens reported an average of 11,063 steps per day at the beginning of the study.

At the end of the study, researchers notes that the average step count had fallen by 840 steps in the intervention group and 22 steps in the control group.

Researchers also collected health information including blood sugar levels, body mass, and blood pressure to find relatively no noticeable changes from levels before the study’s onset.

Newton told Reuters Health that the small number of very active and very inactive adolescents in the study made it "difficult to show a difference that is statistically significant."

————

On The Net:

University of Otago Wellington