Empirical Analysis of Pre-schoolers' Daily Physical Activity in Unconstrained Environment for Home IoT

摘要

Guidelines on physical activity, sedentary behavior and sleep for children under five years of age was published in April 2019 by World Health Organization. There are few works focused on the physical activity (PA) of those under five years of age, because it is not easy to measure them in a well-structured environment. It is time to introduce analysis that will make the guidelines easy to use and meet for nursery school teachers, parents, and researchers. We introduce a child-friendly PA measuring device for daily use and data analysis. We then analyze data of children under five years old in a nursery school from the view point of physical activity, sedentary time and sleep time as recommended in the guidelines. We discuss each individual child's moderate to vigorous intensity physical activity (MVPA) in addition to the children's average MVPA as a group. We then examine continuous sedentary time for four-year-old children and have a look at non-continuous sedentary time that exceeds 60 minutes. We show it is possible to measure both exercises recommended by WHO and the prevalence of physical inactivity with our device. We analyze nap time of children at nursery schools; this analysis contributes to research on sleep rhythm of early childhood, which is in transition from a child's early life rhythms to a social group rhythm. Finally we discuss research gaps related to having an agreeable procedure with which to measure PA in childcare facilities, such as nursery schools. We conclude with a plan to work on the integration of Home IoT networks to enable unconstrained 24-hour home analysis in addition to analysis of the school environment.