Physical Activity for us
Youth and adult physical literacy are an extremely part of our lives. Unfortunately, with the vast number of factors that determine the level of physical literacy, it's difficult to provide technological solutions that promote healthy habits. As mentioned in the previous sections, Wort et al. in 2021 has found that some some students only move their body around 9% of their school day, and only half of the students are meeting their physical activity recommendations for a health and sustainable lifestyle. This means that there needs to be more work to be done on encouraging both youth and adults to become more physically fit as well as giving them viable options of how to create positive habitual activity routines. Physical Literacy turned into Physical Health Cairney et al. (2019) found a very strong determinate of health disease is physical activity. Following this, physical activity is determined by the level of physical literacy that an individual has. Following the chart below, we can see that physical literacy is a complex system that requires many different parts in order to obtain and many factors also depend on each other. This makes it very important to create and finetune technology that supports this process. The aspect that wearable technology can greatly benefit is the movement competency, which could improve confidence and social participation. Thus, it can be assumed that we need to increase physical literacy in our youth in order to promote more physical movement to lead healthier lives in our adulthood. In addition to this, the mental and health benefits are a side effect of this positive change. |
Changing how we move our bodies
Teare & Taks (2021) has found that COVID-19 had a very strong impact on how youth participated in sports. Prior to the pandemic, many kids were participating in sports albeit still not meeting the daily physical requirements. The trends showed that youth tend to drop out of organized sports as they age but might still participate in an unorganized fashion. Looking back at the chart above, we can see that social participation could affect the enjoyment of the activity, however, within a more digital world, the need for a virtual way to interact physically will be ever more important. This means that the function that wearable technology needs to provide must follow or even get ahead of this trend and focus on individual physical literacy in an unorganized and possibly distanced fashion. Performance enhancing wearables McDevitt et al. (2022) also discussed in length about the power of wearables as performance enhancing tools in professional athletes. Currently, there is emphasis put on the data collecting aspect of wearable technology in sports, from looking the field from a health and safety perspective as well as from a performance enhancing perspective. Zhang et al. in 2019 stated that “real time biomechanical feedback in motor learning and training is still rare” due to the amount of research required to make it recognize the full diversity of human beings. The technology is starting to capture the dynamic movement range and analyzing them through artificial intelligence, which allows more finetuning of specific body movements. As our technology advance, real-time biofeedback could allow for further improve in athlete's performance, in both reduction of injury during the training phrase as well as leading our development into stronger and smart athletes. |