Playing video games to keep fit?

Manu Saraswat tries out MOVES while Nicole Nixon and Hannah Johnston look on. (Bruce Bottomley Photo)

Step left. Step right. Step back. Step forward.

Without the glitz—the music, the instructor, the beat—exercise can be really, really boring. It’s no wonder, then, that video games like Nintendo’s Wii Fit and Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution are being marketed as alternatives not just to couch-potato gaming, but to traditional exercise itself.

Last year, Nicole Nixon was one of a handful of kinesiology students who explored the potential health benefits of Nintendo’s Wii gaming console and its motion-control capabilities. Now she’s expanding that research to include the popular Wii Fit game and also testing the health benefits of a new prototype game called MOVES that has been produced by master’s students at Carleton University.

“I honestly didn’t expect to come back to gaming in my studies,” says Ms. Nixon. “But my thesis supervisor sent me an e-mail about the MOVES project and it caught my interest. I think it’s the fact that we see so many people in our society who are inactive, and we’re always looking for entertaining alternatives to exercise. And I want to make sure that they actually work.”

You’ve probably already heard about Wii Fit. Released last spring, it was even harder to find on store shelves than the Wii system itself this past holiday. Using a weight-sensitive “Balance Board,” Wii Fit features a number of exercise games and activities and maps the user’s progress over time. To date, it’s sold over 14 million copies worldwide.

MOVES is a slightly different beast. “It’s an active game that uses accelerometer system to detect full body poses,” explains Hannah Johnston, who worked on the software as part of her master’s program in information technology at Carleton. “We enacted multiple sensors to enforce more rigorous movement, focusing on the lower body as well. We hope that it makes for a more active game.”

Obviously, given that MOVES is a prototype, its production values aren’t quite at the same level as Nintendo’s creation. But it’s still got the core elements of an active game: visual prompts that direct the user what dance moves to attempt, a pumping soundtrack and stats to indicate how many of the moves you’ve successfully completed.

By hooking test participants up to a heart monitor that wirelessly downloads results to a computer database, Ms. Nixon is comparing how well MOVES and Wii Fit provide a cardiovascular workout. Participants spend 30 minutes with each activity, as well as 30 minutes playing an old-fashioned Super Nintendo system to show the difference versus traditional gaming. She also is asking participants to record how much they enjoy each activity and also their level of perceived exertion—how much they think they’re exercising.

Sara Shanahan, a fourth-year year psychology student, is one of the study’s participants. “It’s pretty cool,” she says. “I own DDR (Dance Dance Revolution), and while this is similar, it incorporates the upper body into it more. It’s pretty tiring.”

Manu Saraswat, also in kinesiology, is a little more uncertain about the product but thinks that the concept has potential. “It’s a bit choppy and it doesn’t dance so well yet, but the technology holds promise for actually teaching someone how to dance.”

Ms. Nixon will be compiling her results for her honours thesis, due for completion next month.