Interactive consoles get kids off the couch

LONDON (Reuters) - Working up a sweat playing video gameson Nintendo's interactive Wii console is no replacement forreal exercise but at least it gets overweight children off thecouch, according to British researchers.
Children using a Wii console burned off about 2 percentmore energy over a week compared to those using a traditionalsystem, wrote Gareth Stratton, a researcher at Liverpool JohnMoore's University, and colleagues, in the British MedicalJournal.
The Wii allows users to thrust, wave, swing and twist itsone-handed, motion-sensitive controller to direct the on-screenaction and simulate real life moves such as bowling, hitting atennis ball, or shooting a bow and arrow.
"The children were on their feet and they moved in alldirections while performing basic motor control and fundamentalmovements skills that were not evident during seated gaming,"the team wrote.
"Given the current prevalence of childhood overweight andobesity, such positive behaviors should be encouraged."
The researchers compared bowling, tennis and boxing gameson the Wii to the Project Gotham Racing 3 game on Microsoft'sXBOX 360 console where players simply work the controls withtheir fingers.
Participants, who included six boys and five girls aged13-15, played four computer games for 15 minutes each whilewearing a monitoring device to record how much energy theyburned.
On the Wii, the children sweated off about 60 more caloriesper hour -- a far lower amount than if they had actually playedthe sport. The workout was also not intense enough tocontribute toward the recommended amount of daily physicalactivity for children, the researchers said.
"Playing new generation active computer games usessignificantly more energy than playing sedentary computer gamesbut not as much as energy as playing the sport itself," theresearchers said in the journal's Christmas edition.