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Standard pedometers not accurate for kids

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Reuters Health

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Commercially available pedometers are not reliable for step-counting in children, especially at a slower walking pace, according to researchers at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minnesota.

Compared with manual step counting, pedometers were inaccurate nearly 100 percent of the time at slow walking speeds and about 60 percent of the time at faster speeds, Dr. James A. Levine and colleagues found.

By contrast, ankle-worn accelerometers -- an alternate type of step-counting device -- were only 24 percent inaccurate at slow speed and just 5 percent at higher speed, the researchers report in the journal Pediatrics.

However, accelerometers currently cost 10 to 20 times more than commercially available pedometers, prohibiting their use outside of research settings, Levine told Reuters Health.

His group wanted to find out if pedometers could be used to encourage overweight children to get more exercise. They conclude there's a need for better technologies for measuring daily movement in children, as well as "effective and inexpensive strategies to help children move more and become healthier," said Levine.

He and his colleagues compared the accuracy of two types of commercially available pedometers and one type of accelerometer worn by 27 children, 8 to 12 years old. Eleven of the children (7 boys and 4 girls) were overweight or obese, and the remaining 16 (6 boys and 10 girls) were of normal weight.

The investigators manually counted the steps taken by each of the children while they walked on level ground at their own pace and while they were on a treadmill walking at rates of 0.5 to 2.0 miles per hour for set durations.

When the team compared the manual counts with those obtained from each of the pedometers, they saw that accelerometers were fairly accurately while standard pedometers were very inaccurate. Moreover, accelerometer errors did not differ by weight category, while pedometer errors were more likely in overweight than normal weight children.

Until more accurate and less cost-prohibitive devices are developed, Levine's group suggests overweight children be encouraged to chart their active and inactive times to identify opportunities for increased physical activity.

SOURCE: Pediatrics, January 2009.


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