The Quest for the Perfect ExerGame

I have just finished rather an intense period of grant proposal writing. Phew! In making the case for support, one of the issues that arose was the impact that it would have on Health Promotion research and practice. In essence the proposal was about developing a new model of health behavior that would lead to forms of health promotion intervention supported by mobile technology. The best acronym that I could come up with was a “C.A.T.” – Clever Application of Technology.
Now CATs come in all different shapes and sizes, some are domesticated and others are in the wild, but just how many Health Promotion CATs have you spotted? Okay, an informative and resourceful web presence is a good use of technology, but it is pretty much standard practice now. So I don’t think it would really count as a CAT.
I had a hunch that there are really not that many Health Promotion CATs out there so I decided to try and track some down. Once I finally managed to get hold of an electronic copy of the conference program form last year’s International Society for Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity’s (ISBNPA) annual conference, I got out my virtual binoculars and searched for anything to do with “technology”.
Sightings were scarce to say the least and I only managed to spot 5 CATs in the whole program of over 300 different research presentations! The thing is, 4 of them (of which one was my own CAT) constituted the symposium “Active Computer Games as a Tool to Promote Physical Activity Among Children”. The other remaining CAT that I caught sight of was on the use of GPS to map physical activity patterns in a rural New Zealand community.
So there you have it, only 5 CATs were spotted at last year’s ISBNPA conference and 4 of them were about ExerGaming! Whether you think of it as 4 out of 5 or 8 out of 10, it was a strong showing for ExerGaming CATs. But more significantly, if this is a barometer of the Health Promotion CAT population in general, it indicates that for the time being at least, they are still pretty rare creatures.