Study: Active Videogames Make Kids Break a Sweat

The Wii makes things easy to measure for researchers, as noted here many moons ago. The Wii Fit has spawned research linking active video games with increased health benefits. This seems to be a developing trend, as more research along these lines has been presented recently.

Charlene Laino over at WebMD reports that Gregory Brown, over at University of Nebraska, presented a study at the 55th Annual Meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine.

Brown and colleagues studied 25 youngsters whose average age was 11. The kids burned two to three times as many calories when playing Wii Boxing and Wii Tennis than when engaging in traditional handheld video games.

Their average heart rate shot up from 80 to 120 beats per minute — “about what you’d expect when walking or doing a slow dance,” Brown says.

Brown thought the kids would burn even more calories when playing Dance Dance Revolution, where participants stand in front of the television and boogie in step to instructions and graphics on the screen. But that didn’t prove to be the case; all three games proved equally beneficial.

Also presented at the conference was a study comparing Dance Mat Mania and Eye Toy Boxing, games which require physical activity, with a handheld game and watching a DVD. The less physical activities produced caloric consumption on par with reading; the active games produced heart rates equivalent to jogging. This second study was presented by Viki Penpraze, a doc candidate over at U. Glasgow in Scotland.

Meanwhile, Erica Hendry at USA Today reports all public schools in West Virginia will use Dance Dance Revolution next year, and North Carolina schools will introduce, “the HOPSports Training System into schools through a partnership with Be Active North Carolina, a non-profit group.” It offers simulated basketball dribbling and other sports related skills.

References:
Hendry, E. R. (2008, July 31). Exercise video games get kids off the couch. USA Today. [Online]. Retrieved August 1, 2008 from http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/weightloss/
2008-07-30-exercise-games_N.htm

Laino, C. (2008, May 30). Kids feel the burn with virtual exercise. [Online]. Available: http://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/news/20080530/
kids-feel-the-burn-with-virtual-exercise

Study: Videogames Help Surgeons a Wii Bit

Researchers at Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center in Phoenix found in an experiment that resident physicians performed better at simulated surgery following videogame play on a Nintendo Wii. The study called to mind the intriguing work by Rosser et al on videogames’ positive benefits for laproscopic surgeons.

The motion-sensitive Wiimote is credited with the benefits this time, according to an article in New Scientist by Michael Reilly. Kanav Kahol and Marshall Smith at BGSMC are developing surgery-specific software to run on the Wii that promises to offer resident physicians much cheaper training platforms than what has traditionally been available.

The study had participants using ProMIS software from Haptic.com, as well as Wii games such as Marble Mania. Games involving fine motor skills seemed more beneficial than games only requiring gross motor skills (an intuitive conclusion). Thus, Wii Tennis was not as beneficial for surgeons as Marble Mania.

Results have not yet been peer reviewed, but word of the findings has appeared in New Scientist and the Cleveland Leader. Kahol and Smith plan to present their findings at the Medicine Meets Virtual Reality conference that runs Jan. 29 – Feb. 1 in Long Beach, California.

References:
Cleveland Leader. (2008, January 17). Video games help surgeons fine-tune their skills. [Online.] Retrieved January 17, 2008 from: http://www.clevelandleader.com/node/4377

Reilly, M. (2008, January 19). A Wii warm-up hones surgical skills. New Scientist. [Online.] Available: http://technology.newscientist.com/channel/tech/
mg19726396.100-a-wii-warmup-hones-surgical-skills.html