Discouraging sedentary behaviors using interactive play

Regular physical activity has many benefits, including to a person’s physical, emotional, and cognitive well-being [1]. Although adults should achieve 150 minutes of moderate- to vigorous-intensity physical activity per week, only 15 percent of adults meet these guidelines in at least 10-minute bouts, and only 5 percent of adults meet these guidelines in at least 30-minute bouts on five or more days per week (see [2]). For children, the statistics are even more discouraging. Although kids should get 60 minutes of activity per day, only 7 percent of Canadian youth accumulate 60 minutes per day six days a week (see [2]). The exercise habits adopted by children and pre-teens during this critical period can have lifelong consequences in physical health and self esteem. To encourage physical activity, researchers and developers in HCI have created a variety of “exergames,” which encourage people to exercise by integrating exertion into the game mechanics (e.g., [3]). Many exergames have focused on providing intense physical activity for players and have been shown to yield sufficient exertion to obtain the aforementioned benefits to a player’s well-being. However, recent work among health researchers has shown that there are also negative physiological consequences associated with sedentary behavior and that these consequences are distinct from those that result from a lack of physical activity [1]. Although this may seem surprising, physical activity and sedentary behavior are not mutually exclusive. Even if a person is physically active (e.g., biking to work in the morning), she can also be sedentary (e.g., by primarily sitting for the remaining waking hours); the effects of too much sitting are physiologically distinct from too little exercise [1]. The potential negative health outcomes are of particular relevance to populations who spend large parts of the day sitting, for example, schoolchildren who spend many hours a day sitting at their desks, and groups that struggle to gain access to opportunities for regular physical activity, for example, people with mobility impairments and older adults in long-term care

Emotional response and visual attention to non-photorealistic images

Non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) algorithms are used to produce stylized images, and have generally been evaluated on the aesthetic qualities of the resulting images. NPR-produced images have been used for aesthetic and practical reasons in media intended to produce an emotional reaction in a consumer (e.g., computer games, films, advertisements, and web sites); however, it is not understood how non-photorealistic rendering affects the emotion portrayed in an image. We conducted a study of subjective emotional response and visual attention to five common NPR approaches, two blurring techniques, and the original image with 42 participants, and found that the NPR algorithms dampened participants emotional responses in terms of arousal (activation) and valence (pleasure). Gaze data revealed that NPR rendering of images might reduce emotional response to an image by producing confusion, creating distracting visual artifacts, causing the loss of meaningful semantic information, or causing users to lose interest in the resulting image

Kansas agricultural student

Published as: The Kansas agricultural student, vol. 1, no. 1 (Dec. 1921)-v.30, no. 3 (Feb. 1954); Kansas State College ag student, vol. 30, no. 4 (Mar. 1954)-v.35, no. 4 (Mar. 1959); Kansas State University ag student, vol. 35, no. 5 (Apr. 1959)-v.44, no. 4 (May 1968).Call number: S1.K3Morse Department of Special Collection