New Video Games Help Blind Kids Play

VI Fit, a project at the University of Nevada, Reno, helps children who are blind become more physically active and healthy through video games. The human-computer interaction research team in the computer science and engineering department has developed a motion-sensing-based tennis and bowling exergame.

"Lack of vision forms a significant barrier to participation in physical activity and consequently children with visual impairments have much higher obesity rates and obesity-related illnesses such as diabetes," Eelke Folmer, research team leader and assistant professor in the computer science and engineering department, said.

"Exergames" are a new type of video game that use physical activity as input and are considered powerful weapons in the fight against obesity. Unfortunately, exergames have not yet been accessible to children with visual impairments, although it is evident they could benefit from them the most.
"Our games are adaptations of the popular Nintendo Wii Sports exercise games that have been modified so they can be played without visual feedback," Folmer said.

VI Tennis and VI Bowling are the first of several games to be made available. VI Tennis implements the gameplay of Wii sports tennis providing audio and vibrotactile cues that indicate when to serve and when to return the ball. It can be played against the computer or against a friend using two Wii remotes.

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Advertisers Live And Die With Superstar Endorsements

When a company drafts a single celebrity to represent a brand, it can backfire -- in the way Tiger Woods' behavior was thought to have potentially affected certain brands. A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research examines different ways to secure brand loyalty.

"A widely applied method for improving how people feel about a brand is to pair the brand with positive stimuli," write authors Steven Sweldens (INSEAD), Stijn van Osselaer (Erasmus University), and Chris Janiszewski (University of Florida). "A brand can be advertised using attractive imagery, endorsements by a celebrity, or used in event sponsoring. Invariably, advertisers hope that the favorable feelings generated by the positive stimuli will attach to the brand."

The pairing of a brand with positive stimuli is called evaluative conditioning, and the researchers found that evaluative conditioning can occur in two different ways: direct transfer and indirect transfer.

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Youth Sports Coaches Should Prioritize Teaching Over Winning

Young athletes' achievement goals can change in a healthy way over the course of a season when their coaches create a mastery motivational climate rather than an ego orientation, University of Washington sport psychologists have found. A mastery climate stresses positive communication between coaches and athletes, teamwork and doing one's best. An ego climate, typified by many professional sports coaches, focuses on winning at all costs and being better than others.

"Much of life is affected by motivation and achievement," said Ronald Smith, a UW psychology professor and lead author of a new study. "Our study looked at children 9 to 13 years of age and there was no difference by age or sex. And it was also significant because it shows the influence of a mastery climate on children's achievement goals in a relatively short time, 12 weeks."

For several decades psychologists have believed that children under the age of 11 or 12 could not distinguish between effort and ability. That still may be true when it comes to academics, but the new research indicates that children as young as 9 can tell the difference between the two while participating in sports.

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Exercise When Young To Get Strong Bones When Old

The positive effects of exercise while growing up seem to last longer than previously believed. New findings suggest that physical activity when young increases bone density and size, which may mean a reduced risk of osteoporosis later in life, reveals a thesis from the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.


For the thesis, around 3,200 men had their bones examined and their exercise habits mapped. Of these, just over 2,300 18-year-olds were selected at random to have their heel bone examined by the researchers. The heel bone is particularly useful to study as it is directly impacted by exercise, being loaded with the full weight of the body.

"In this group, we found that those who actively did sports, and also those who used to do sports, had greater bone density than those who had never done sports," explains Martin Nilsson, physiotherapist and doctoral student at the Institute of Medicine.

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Get Off The Treadmill And On The Trail

How much "green exercise" produces the greatest improvement in mood and sense of personal well-being? A new study in the American Chemical Society's semi-monthly journal Environmental Science & Technology has a surprising answer.  The answer is likely to please people in a society with much to do but little time to do it: Just five minutes of exercise in a park, working in a backyard garden, on a nature trail, or other green space will benefit mental health.

Jules Pretty and Jo Barton explain in the study that green exercise is physical activity in the presence of nature. Abundant scientific evidence shows that activity in natural areas decreases the risk of mental illness and improves the sense of well-being. Until now, however, nobody knew how much time people had to spend in green spaces to get those and other benefits.

"For the first time in the scientific literature, we have been able to show dose-response relationships for the positive effects of nature on human mental health," Pretty said.

From an analysis of 1,252 people (of different ages, genders and mental health status) drawn from ten existing studies in the United Kingdom, the authors were able to show that activity in the presence of nature led to mental and physical health improvements.

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Hockey, Concussions and TBI

Photo by Yong Kim/Philly.com Staff Photographer

Dan's note: I am very pleased to publish this guest post from Chelsea Travers. She is an outreach representative for CareMeridian, a subacute care facility, with locations throughout the Western United States for patients suffering from traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury or medical complexities, such as neuromuscular or congenital anomalies.

By Chelsea Travers

Hockey is arguably one of the most physical professional sports. Hockey players are constantly getting body checked, slammed into boards, falling to the ice, slapped by a stick, hit by a dense, speeding puck or getting punched during a fight. If that isn’t bad enough, hockey players take part in one of the longest regular seasons of any sport, effectively taking on harsher pain for a longer amount of time throughout the year.    

Risk of injury couldn’t be clearer as it is common to see hockey players missing their front two teeth. With all of the injuries that can occur, one of the most dangerous is a traumatic brain injury (TBI). A TBI is a silent injury that can cause harm to the mind and body of an individual. An injury to the head or brain can alter someone’s life and can even require long-term rehabilitation and care from a skilled nursing facility. These injuries are often far too common in the sport of hockey and if not properly treated can permanently leave a hockey player's life more challenging than the game they play.

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Science Fair Project Leads To New Sports Concussion Test

A simple test of reaction time may help determine whether athletes have sustained a concussion (also known as mild traumatic brain injury) and when they are ready to play again, according to a study released February 15 that was presented at the American Academy of Neurology's 62nd Annual Meeting in Toronto last month.

According to a story by NPR; "The test is the idea of Ian Richardson, a Michigan high-school student. The teenager devised it as a quick and simple way to test reaction time for a science fair project.  Richardson's device looks like something out of a 19th-century medical text. It's a hockey puck, with a long rod embedded in the middle. The stick is marked off in centimeter increments.  Turns out Ian Richardson's father, James, is on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School. He thought Ian's idea might be a pretty cool on-the-spot way to screen for concussions among athletes"

Dr. Richardson forwarded the idea to James Eckner, MD, of the University of Michigan Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation in Ann Arbor.  Eckner and his colleagues developed a simple, inexpensive device to measure reaction time: a cylinder attached to a weighted disk. The examiner releases the device and the athlete catches it as soon as possible.

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Which Comes First For Athletes - Money Or Motivation?

Whether it's for money, marbles or chalk, the brains of reward-driven people keep their game faces on, helping them win at every step of the way. Surprisingly, they win most often when there is no reward.  That's the finding of neuroscientists at Washington University in St. Louis, who tested 31 randomly selected subjects with word games, some of which had monetary rewards of either 25 or 75 cents per correct answer, others of which had no money attached.

Subjects were given a short list of five words to memorize in a matter of seconds, then a 3.5-second interval or pause, then a few seconds to respond to a solitary word that either had been on the list or had not. Test performance had no consequence in some trials, but in others, a computer graded the responses, providing an opportunity to win either 25 cent or 75 cents for quick and accurate answers. Even during these periods, subjects were sometimes alerted that their performance would not be rewarded on that trial.

Prior to testing, subjects were submitted to a battery of personality tests that rated their degree of competitiveness and their sensitivity to monetary rewards.

Designed to test the hypothesis that excitement in the brains of the most monetary-reward-sensitive subjects would slacken during trials that did not pay, the study is co-authored by Koji Jimura, PhD, a post-doctoral researcher, and Todd Braver, PhD, a professor, both based in psychology in Arts & Sciences. Braver is also a member of the neuroscience program and radiology department in the university's School of Medicine.
But the researchers found a paradoxical result: the performance of the most reward-driven individuals was actually most improved -- relative to the less reward-driven -- in the trials that paid nothing, not the ones in which there was money at stake.

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Motivation Is Required For Weight Loss

Energy in, energy out, it's the basic equation to weight loss, or is it? With more than two thirds of Americans classified as overweight or obese, a new study examines how motivation might be a large contributor to sticking with weight loss programs.

Researchers at the University of Kentucky and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill examined two types of motivation, autonomous and controlled, and their relationship to adherence and weight loss in a 16-week Internet weight-loss intervention. To measure the 2 types of motivation, a Treatment Self-Regulation Questionnaire was used to identify those participants motivated by intrinsic and extrinsic controls such as feeling that performance is the best way to help oneself and making changes for personal reasons (autonomous motivation) and those participants motivated by only external controls such as perceived pressure from others and feelings of guilt (controlled motivation).

Motivation for weight loss was measured at baseline and 4, 8, 12, and 16 weeks. In addition, study participants recorded their food intake, exercise, and body weight through an on-line self-monitoring system weekly throughout the study.

Over half of the participants (37 of 66) lost 5% of initial body weight at the 16-week follow-up. To examine the relationship between the 2 different types of motivation and weight loss, the sample was divided into those who had and those who had not lost 5% of initial body weight by 16 weeks (37 and 29 participants, respectively).

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