Abstract

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The Children’s Health project sponsored by the City of Sunderland Digital Challenge project examined the impact of providing health-focused digital technologies to children aged 11-15 years, in terms of their usage and requirements of such technologies, and their subsequent behavioural changes.

The empirical study ran with three groups of six children over a period of seven weeks for each group. A console-based exercise game and an exercise-focused social website were used in the study and the focus was on opportunistic (unstructured/unplanned) exercise.

The emergent findings are:
• Data collected about physical activity must be more extensive than simple step counts.
• Data collection technologies for activities must be ubiquitous but invisible.
• Social interaction via technology is expected; positive messages reinforcing attainments of goals are valued; negative feedback is seen as demotivating.
• participants were very open to sharing information (privacy was not a concern).
• Authority figures have a significant impact on restricting adolescents’ use of technologies.

This document reports the how the study was conducted, analyses the findings and draws conclusions from these regarding how to use digital technologies to improve and/or maintain the physical activity levels of children throughout their adolescence and on into adulthood.

The appendices provide the detailed (anonymised) data collected during the study and the background literature review.