Activity Monitoring Project

Obesity is a growing problem in children. Although it is assumed that a lack of physical activity is involved, there are few actual measurements of activity in both overweight and normalweight children, and how activity relates to body composition. The goal of the Activity Monitoring Project is to provide a quantitative measure of body composition and physical activity through the normal day of children as an element of a routine health report card. The research aims are to develop quantitative measures of body composition and physical activity for small children focusing on the school setting. Instrumentation designed for body composition measurements is compared and validated and the appropriate means to educate children on the implications of these data are being tested and brought to practice. Simultaneously, tools to measure physical activity will be interfaced to data analysis technologies to interpret physical acitivity as spontaneous play, exercise, eating, study and sleep.