Wired Well
A special report on personal technology for health, family and fitness.
Tom Sawyer, that always useful icon of American boyhood, certainly didn’t need a fitness tracker; no point counting his steps, or checking his heart rate at particularly exciting moments. In his constant quest for adventure, he “gamified” his own life, as we now might say, but it didn’t require gadgets.
But fitness trackers and wearable devices are big business these days, and parents tend to hover close, fascinated by the details of their children’s lives. So it’s not surprising that there is interest in fitness trackers as potentially useful tools for kids struggling with weight problems, or for families trying to build more physical activity into their screen-filled lives, or as just one more set of cool electronic toys.
Fitness trackers raise questions on issues ranging from data security to self-image. And like adults, children and adolescents vary in how they react to wearable devices.
“There’s the device, but probably more important is what the person wearing the device brings into the equation,” said Dr. Megan Moreno, an associate professor of pediatrics and health services at the University of Washington in Seattle, who studies the ways that children and adolescents use technology.
In a study of middle school and high school students who were given wearable fitness trackers, many loved them, Dr. Moreno said, and rose to the challenge of “winning the day” by taking 10,000 steps. Others stopped using the devices, she said, because they made physical activity a burden.
“They would stress out about it if they didn’t have gym that day or they had a lot of homework and they didn’t win — they felt bad about themselves.”
And then there were the kids who used the devices for a while and simply got bored with them.
Even among adults, who have proved a ready market for fitness trackers, there seems to be a great deal of attrition. However, for many adults, there is at least interest in the idea of knowing what your body is actually doing, quantifying your activity, your sleep, your caloric intake. When it comes to children, many people who study what has come to be called the “quantified self” worry about the ways that this constant flow of intimate information may influence a child or adolescent’s developing self-image.
The risk is that children may be discouraged by the information, and that constant updates about how they are actually doing may paradoxically make them feel less able to change their own stories.
“Some people are motivated, ‘I see how I’m not doing so well, so I need to walk more,’” said Amanda Lenhart, a researcher at the Data and Society Research Institute in New York. “Other people see, ‘I’m never going to catch up to my sister, so I’m just going to sit here.’”
Trackers count your steps and take your pulse, they record sophisticated data about your body, as it steps through daily life. But where does that data get stored? And who owns the information? And does it count as medical information, subject to all those special protections? Fitness trackers often communicate with other devices including computers and smartphones, and they store data on their company servers. What they collect — and store — is not treated as protected health information, and there are concerns that it could make its way to marketers — or to insurance companies.
“Parents should definitely be aware that the companies that market these devices are not subject to the rules that they think of as governing health information,” said Lindsay Wiley, an associate professor at the Washington College of Law at American University, who works on the intersection of public health and law. “There’s nothing to stop the company from selling it, and marketers can find it very valuable.”
Michelle De Mooy, the deputy director of consumer privacy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit advocacy organization based in Washington, says there are always special concerns when children are using products designed for adults.
“There are a lot of restrictions around advertising to kids — when you give a kid an adult product, those are gone,” she said. “You might start getting things for obesity,” she added, referring to ads, “things that would be fine for an adult to get — not so fine for a kid.”
The message for parents is to pay attention to their children’s needs and preferences. The best way to encourage physical activity is to find an activity or a sport or a skill that the child enjoys, and to encourage participation and pleasure, skill-building and mastery. Technology offers a burgeoning set of fitness tools, along with a new set of rewards, problems, and quantifications.
A wearable device “gives you a number and some flashing lights,” Dr. Moreno said. “Gamers like numbers and flashing lights — some kids don’t respond as well.”
When a patient is looking for strategies to help increase physical activity, Dr. Jean E. Burr, a doctor of adolescent medicine at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, likes to demonstrate some of the free apps on her own phone.
“I’ll ask them if they’re interested in some resources that could help, and if they say yes, I’ll often pull out my phone and demonstrate some of the apps I use,” she said, pointing out apps that tailor short workouts, or provide nutritional information, or map out your run, walk or bike ride. “There’s a lot of health-based technology that doesn’t require a separate device.”
We shouldn’t look to technology as a panacea for anything as complicated as overweight and obesity, and though these devices and other social media strategies may be helpful to some children — and some adults — none of this is simple.
“I think it gets at that complex nature of how we interact with our devices — what stories they tell us, what kind of data, what kind of information,” Dr. Moreno said. “And then, what kind of stories do we tell ourselves about our relationship with that technology.”
Related:
- How Period Trackers Have Changed Girl Culture
- Dog Needs a Walk? There’s an App for That
- See all Wired Well stories.
For more fitness, food and wellness news, follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or sign up for our newsletter.