Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Aug 29, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Sep 11, 2018 - Oct 3, 2018
Date Accepted: Oct 17, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Perceptions of Visualizing Physical Activity as a 3D-Printed Object: Formative Study
Background:
The UK government recommends that children engage in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity for at least 60 min every day. Despite associated physiological and psychosocial benefits of physical activity, many youth fail to meet these guidelines partly due to sedentary screen-based pursuits displacing active behaviors. However, technological advances such as 3D printing have enabled innovative methods of visualizing and conceptualizing physical activity as a tangible output.
Objective:
The aim of this study was to elicit children’s, adolescents’, parents’, and teachers’ perceptions and understanding of 3D physical activity objects to inform the design of future 3D models of physical activity.
Methods:
A total of 28 primary school children (aged 8.4 [SD 0.3] years; 15 boys) and 42 secondary school adolescents (aged 14.4 [SD 0.3] years; 22 boys) participated in semistructured focus groups, with individual interviews conducted with 8 teachers (2 male) and 7 parents (2 male). Questions addressed understanding of the physical activity guidelines, 3D model design, and both motivation for and potential engagement with a 3D physical activity model intervention. Pupils were asked to use Play-Doh to create and describe a model that could represent their physical activity levels (PAL). Data were transcribed verbatim and thematically analyzed, and key emergent themes were represented using pen profiles.
Results:
Pupils understood the concept of visualizing physical activity as a 3D object, although adolescents were able to better analyze and critique differences between low and high PAL. Both youths and adults preferred a 3D model representing a week of physical activity data when compared with other temporal representations. Furthermore, all participants highlighted that 3D models could act as a motivational tool to enhance youths’ physical activity. From the Play-Doh designs, 2 key themes were identified by pupils, with preferences indicated for models of abstract representations of physical activity or bar charts depicting physical activity, respectively.
Conclusions:
These novel findings highlight the potential utility of 3D objects of physical activity as a mechanism to enhance children’s and adolescents’ understanding of, and motivation to increase, their PAL. This study suggests that 3D printing may offer a unique strategy for promoting physical activity in these groups.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.