This report presents preliminary physical control experiments for capturing and modeling the affective state of entertainment — that is, whether people are having “fun” — of users of the innovative Playware playground, an interactive physical playground. The goal is to construct, using representative statistics computed from children’s physiological hear rate (HR) signals, an estimator of the d...

BACKGROUND Although there is global growth in outdoor smokefree areas, little is known about the associated smokefree signage. We aimed to study smokefree signage at playgrounds and to compare field observations with images from Google Street View (GSV). METHODS We randomly selected playgrounds in 21 contiguous local government areas in the lower North Island of New Zealand, all of which had ...

BACKGROUND This pilot study aimed at investigating the effectiveness of lowering playground density on increasing children's physical activity and decreasing sedentary time. Also the feasibility of this intervention was tested. METHODS Data were collected in September and October 2012 in three Belgian schools in 187, 9-12 year old children. During the intervention, playground density was decr...

Outdoor recreational spaces have the potential to increase physical activity. This study used a quasi-experimental evaluation design to determine how a playground renovation impacts usage and physical activity of children and whether the visitations correlate with children's physical activity levels and parental impressions of the playground. Observational data and intercept interviews were col...

Slovene press has recently expressed concern for the health of children who ingest playground sand contaminated with lead. However, current assessments may be overestimating the health risk, as they assume that human body absorbs the whole amount of a contaminant. The aim of our study was to see how much lead in sand intended for playground sandboxes in Slovenia really is absorbed and what heal...

In this within-subjects design field experiment children's behaviour in the playground was charted as a function of gender and time in the classroom immediately preceding playtime. Playground behaviour was also related to post-recess classroom behaviour. Twenty-three 9-year-old children were observed for 14 weeks. Classroom behaviour (i.e., task relevant behaviour on standardised seat work imme...

A training method for robust recognition of color uniforms of soccer robots is proposed in this paper. Surface illuminative conditions of playground in competition environment are tested by training before competition. Soccer robots with different single color uniforms move on the playground along the planned trajectory, then color information of the moving robot in different positions on the p...