It can be difficult to strike the “just right” balance in a children hectic day—not too much sport, not too little sleep. While parents can find it difficult to fit in homework between extracurricular obligations and downtime, groundbreaking software might offer a much-needed alternative.
The Healthy-Day-App, created by the University of South Australia in collaboration with the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, assists parents in determining which mix of activities will best benefit their child’s academic, physical, and mental development.
The study found that swapping 60 minutes of TV watching for 60 minutes of exercise led to a 4.2% drop in body fat, a 2.5% rise in happiness, and a 0.9% rise in academic achievement.
Dr. Dot Dumuid of UniSA, who led the study, says that the software will help parents and health care providers understand how children’s time use affects their health and how well they do in school.
According to Dr. Dumuid, “how children use their time can have a huge impact on their health, wellbeing, and productivity.”
“Since video games are known to be bad for children’s health, it is simple to predict the consequences if they choose to play them instead of participating in sports.”
“This app directs users toward better behaviors. By tracking the child’s existing activities throughout the day and utilizing the app to modify them, we can simulate how any changes are anticipated to affect a child’s physical, mental, and academic performance.
“It’s a quick and simple technique that can produce results for children’s health and wellbeing.”
By analyzing 1685 data entries from the Australian Child Health CheckPoint study (children between the ages of 11 and 12), the new tool lets users possibly change how they spend their time.
It asks users to enter a child’s current 24-hour time usage across seven categories, including sleep, screen time, physical activity, quiet time (such as reading or listening to music), passive transportation (such as taking public transportation), school-related time (including homework), and domestic/self-care time (getting ready).
It also has a sophisticated function that allows medical experts to take social class and puberty into account. App users can change sliders to test out different time zones on the following panel (accessible by choosing “Specify reallocations” on the left side bar). The expected changes in body fat percentage, mental health, and academic performance are shown in both numbers and graphs.
According to Dr. Dumuid, “The Healthy-Day-App allows parents, caregivers, and health professionals to think about potential changes to a children day and predict how this would affect health outcomes.”
“I advise parents to experiment with it since doing so might prompt you to reevaluate how much screen time their child spends in the car, at a café, or while they are waiting for an appointment.”
Test it out and see. You might be surprised. ”
The Healthy-Day-App can be accessed here: www.unisa.edu.au/Healthy-Day-App
