Evaluation of Fitness Tracker Data as a Method of Increasing Physical Activity in University Student

There is a max word count of 1500 words (this does not include citation and references but does include everything else).

The deadline is 10^thJanuary 2022 12pm.

Your target audience is undergraduates like yourself.

Be aware your academic tutor will be paying particular attention to the statistical tests to use, how closely you follow the format, your standard of written communication and how precisely you process and display your results.

You will need to produce a scientific report using the format below:

Title: Evaluation of Fitness Tracker Data as a Method of Increasing Physical Activity in University Students

You are being asked to analyse the results of a scientific study. This study, conducted at the University of Reading, recruited students to wear a fitness tracker for 6 weeks. This fitness tracker recorded exercise sessions throughout the week, the fitness tracker counted any period where heart rate was above 160bpm for 10 minutes as “one exercise session”.  

After receiving these data, you must first introduce the background to this study and methodology involved in collecting the information. Analyse these data to determine if students seeing their fitness tracker data conducted more/less exercise and then discuss the results of the study and its relevance and limitations.

This report will have the following sections contained within it, please include (but not limit yourself to the following topics during your report):

Introduction (approx. 500 words):

What are the physiological and biochemical effects of exercise

What are the physiological and biochemical benefits of a regular exercise regimen (do aerobic and anaerobic exercise have different impacts on the body?)

Discuss the impact of exercise has on TWO NAMED health conditions

What is a fitness tracker?

What is the current research consensus on whether fitness trackers actually increase rates of exercise?

Objectives for this study

Methods (approx. 300-400 words)

The purpose is to provide enough information that the reader could repeat what you did.

Utilise the basic outline (detailed in the data document) to write your ownsuggested methodology.  

Use (and reference) similar studies from the literature to support your methodology.

Two key parts to the methods:

Field/lab methods - The actual methods by which these data were collected (i.e. participant recruitment, demographics, how exercise was measured etc)

Data analysis– the tests used (e.g. t-tests, assumption test, etc.), software used, etc.

Pay special attention to how you eliminated sampling bias in your experimental design.

 

Results (max 100 words)

To analyse your data, you will need to do the following:

Think about what questions you want to analyse.

For example, you could ask some or all of the following:

Difference between the male exercise with and withoutfitness tracker data?

Difference between the female exercise with and withoutfitness tracker data?

Difference between all student exercise (male and female) with and withoutfitness tracker data?

Difference between the effect of fitness tracker dataon males and females?

You need the select which questions are appropriate?

Think about the hypothesis for each question you are asking.

For example:

Null hypothesis: There is no significant difference in the number of exercise sessions of students when students could see their fitness tracker data compared to students who could not see their fitness tracker data.

Alternative hypothesis: There is a significant difference in the number of exercise sessions of students when students could see their fitness tracker data compared to students who could not see their fitness tracker data.

Select the appropriate statistical test.

Conduct assumption tests for normality and homogeneity of variance (if needed)

The results to present (in the report) in this section will be:

Brief one or two sentences summarising results of each of the tests you have performed.

For example, “There was a significant difference in the mean weight of male versus female tigers (Independent-sample ttest: t₁₉₈ = 76.5, P<0.001). Female tigers were significantly heavier (Figure 1)”

Graph(s) illustrating results:

 

Discussion (approx. 500-700 words)

Summary of your results:

What did you discover? How do your results compare to other similar studies?

Limitations:

Was there anything about the study that might indicate that the results may have limitations when being applied to the general population?

What biases effected your study?

Suggestions for what needs to be done in future studies.

Summary : A single paragraph that summarizes the previous subsections.