Information about accelerometers
Accelerometers (Activity belts)
The accelerometers are used to measure the pupil’s activity throughout the day. They work by counting movement in 3-dimensions against time, so they can let us know how active the pupils were at different times of day.
When to wear the belt
The pupils should be encouraged to wear the belt as much as possible throughout the day, from when they get up in the morning, until they go to bed at night. They should wear it at home, at school, to most clubs and over the weekend. From data recorded so far, this has been one of the main issues encountered.
When not to wear the belt
There are only 3 times when the pupils should remove their belts:
When they have a bath or shower or going swimming (total immersion). There is no issue with wearing them in heavy rain or bad weather. The belts should be put it back on again as soon as possible afterwards.
When they go to bed. We are only interested in activity during waking hours. Pupils should be encouraged to leave it by the side of their bed so they can put it straight on when they get up in the morning.
When they are playing VERY ROUGH CONTACT SPORTS OR ACTIVITIES. Although the accelerometers will not be damaged, this is to prevent injury to the pupil. The belt should be worn for PE and most sports, games and activities, e.g. football, dance, hockey, athletics, tennis, gymnastics and most of the things that a child does. For a particularly rough contact sport, e.g. karate, they may prefer to take it off and put it back on as soon as they have finished.
When to bring the belt back to school
The pupils need to wear the belt for 6 days (including the day it is given to them) and hand it to the teacher the seventh day. For instance, belts given on a Tuesday should be returned to their teacher on the following Monday.
A poster is supplied to be displayed in the classroom to remind the pupils which day the belts are being collected. Once the belts have been collected, please give them to your school office to be collected by our team to prevent disruption of the class.
What information do we get from the belts?
At a basic level, this is grouped together into 6 categories, ranging from sedentary (inactive) to very vigorous. This is illustrated by the example graph below in figure 1:
Figure 1. Example of data from an activity belt
This shows that the child spent 3/4 of their time being sedentary, and although we do cannot tell exactly what they were doing, it will include time spent sat in lessons and meal times, but also areas that could be reduced such as sitting around maybe watching TV, or playing computer games. We will generate a graph just like this for each pupil that wears an activity belt.
In a more in-depth detail, the belts can tell us the time of day, duration and level of activity as shown in figure 2 below:
Figure 2. more detailed example of data received from accelerometer