Interactive Game Technology: Make Behavior Change Fun!

Although behavior changes towards healthy life styles have been emphasized, physical inactivity behavior is still a burden to the US society. To motivate health-related behavior change, interactive games (IG), which usually involve some significant body movements while playing, have been adapted to public health (Baranowski et al., 2008). Recently, IG started to be employed in fitness, rehabilitation, school setting, and individual exercise to promote physical activity and this study provided a summary of studies and findings of IG. For 7-12 year old youths, interactive dance and bicycle games were more effective motivators to be active than traditional dance (Epstein et al., 2007). Doing Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) showed better health outcomes (e.g., higher heart rate, VO2, total energy expenditure (EE), & exercise intensity; Sell et al., 2008). Playing interactive video games also increased energy expenditure (EE) in children (traditional-game: 7.6 VO₂ml/kg/min vs. IG- Final-Furlong-simulated horse-racing with whole-body-movements: 26.5; Ridley & Olds, 2001). Wii activity (boxing 198.1 kj/kg/min) also showed higher EE than resting-EE (125.5) in youth (Graves et al., 2008). In clinical settings, IG assisted with pelvic muscle retaining (McKenna et al., 1999), improved arm control in children with Erb's palsy (Krichevets et al., 1995), enhanced hand-eye coordination (Anshel & Martin, 1996), and helped to recover the upper extremity (Bach-y-Rita et al., 2002). Video game-based exercise was found effective in motivation of practice volume and attention span of the balance in persons with traumatic brain injuries and spinal cord injuries (Betker et al., 2007). O'Conner and colleagues (2001) employed GAME^Wheels System, an effective system to link a wheel and a computer to let wheelchair users to play commercially available video games. GAME^cycle exercise system (Widman et al., 2006) also motivated exercising longer and assisted to increase EE. Robinson et al. (2008) and Shrewsbury et al. (2008), however, warned about possible knee and shoulder injuries from playing IG. While studies have started to show the benefits of IG-based exercise or rehabilitation, sample sizes in these reported studies were small. To generalize the findings, studies with large sample sizes are needed and the effect size of the intervention should be computed. Another limitation is that invalid outcome measures were sometimes employed (e.g., accelerometer was used to measure EE). In conclusion, IG has a great potential in helping physical activity promotion, but large sample size studies are needed to determine the effectiveness of IG-based interventions.
Keyword(s): exercise/fitness/physical activity, technology, therapeutic recreation