Heart Monitors In Middle School Gym Class?

An anonymous reader writes "My son brought home an order form from his middle school. Apparently the 7th (his grade) and 8th graders are being asked (required?) to purchase their own straps for the heart monitors they're to wear during gym class. I know nothing yet of the device in question, but have left a voice-mail with the assistant principal asking him to call me so I may ask some questions about the program and the device. My tinfoil-hat concern is that the heart rate data will be tied to each child, then archived and eventually used for/against them down the road when applying for insurance, high-stress jobs, etc. 'I see you had arrhythmia during 7th grade pickle ball? No insurance for you' Has anyone heard of such a program, or had their child(ren) take part in it? Does the device transmit to the laptop the overweight gym teacher will be watching instead of running laps with the kids? Perhaps data is downloaded from the device after the class? Or am I just being paranoid? Thanks for any insight."

Comments

Holy shit?

[Karganeth]

Are people really this paranoid?

Re:Holy shit?

[Hatta]

Whatever happened to permission slips? Kids run and play. There are inherent risks in allowing them to run and play, but the damage done by not letting them run and play is even greater.

Re:Holy shit?

[MozeeToby]

I'm betting it's not even that and it's just a heart rate monitor to improve the quality of aerobic exercise. Sounds like a pretty good program to me; if kids are going to not do physical activities willingly and do the bare minimum in gym class, monitoring heart rate might be a necessary evil to ensure they get enough exercise.

Re:Holy shit?

[Gerzel]

About Health Insurance in the US it isn't paranoid. They ARE out to get you.

Re:Holy shit?

[Lord Fury]

This seems to be what it's for. I'm 21 now, but during senior year we were required to use pedometers as the first step that was leading up to using heart rate monitors and pedometers to track the amount of work we did. The most we did was record the number of steps we took during class on our own personal chart to keep track of progress. The closest the school got to seeing the charts was when the gym teacher checked over everyone's chart at the end of the week to make sure everyone was doing it and to maybe encourage those that had lower numbers to try harder.

Try and find out from the school what data they'll be keeping, but for the most part this program seems to be getting lazy kids to work harder during gym.

Re:Holy shit?

[TheEldest]

Learning to exercise and keep yourself in shape is a part of the cirriculum.

Start looking up child obesity numbers and you'll see that schools need to be doing more, not less.

I'd imagine the program is to let kids know where their heart rates are, and where they should be to get good exercise. Even if they are recording everything, it's pretty meaningless information. You'd know a person's heart rate from 7th grade.

The bigger issue here is whether your kids are getting exercise and whether they're overweight. If they're heavy, do everything possible to encourage exercise. Once the habits are set, they're incredibly difficult to change once they're adults.

Re:Holy shit?

[ReverendLoki]

Just to point out, it's the libertarians (little l, meaning the political ideology, not the political party) that are most likely to question what these are being used for, and if they are to become some sort of permanent record, to take umbrage with that. Although you are a tad more likely to find libertarians in the Republican party as opposed to the Democratic party, libertarian != conservative.

Myself, I am a slightly left-leaning centrist libertarian, and a new dad (5 days ago! Woot!), I can understand the concern. This is the sort of odd request that I just have to ask "What is this being used for anyways?" I'm not saying I automatically disapprove of it, whatever it is.

yeah, I know, you're just a troll trying for a few bites. I don't care. This really isn't a response to you anyways. I've just seen too many knee-jerk "let's paint everyone who doesn't agree with us with one broad stroke and thus be able to disregard them all" reactions lately.

Re:Holy shit?

[Phanatic1a]

They'll be allowed to run and play, but if they do it during school, they'll wear a heart monitor.

Yes. First, there's the financial cost; it's hard enough for schools to afford, you know, *gym equipment* in the first place, and now you want them to buy heart monitors for every kid as well? Kids can learn about heart rates and pulses quite adequately without that expenditure, and as far as target heart rate and exercise goes, two fingers on the wrist and a frigging watch with a second hand work fine.

Second, there's the social cost. You're either teaching them that "This routine physical activity we're requiring you to engage in is so dangerous it could *kill you* and you need to wear one of these to be safe," or "Our society is so ridiculously litigious and cowardly that this is what it's come to." That generation's going to be even more fucked up than the one that thought the TSA sounded like a good idea.

Oh, how fitting. The captcha I've been given to post this is 'bogeymen.'

Re:Holy shit?

[gbarules2999]

Last I checked, they're all batshit insane, the guy in the summary included.

Re:Holy shit?

[Vancorps]

While I understand your point of view I also understand the point of view of parents who's kids have actually died from congenital heart defects which show themselves during physical activity. These heart monitors would alert someone before the kid actually collapsed.

So yes, what they are doing could kill them if it isn't monitored appropriately but that doesn't stop the activity from being important. This is just a way to ease the paranoia of parents while allowing PE classes to stay as opposed to what strategy a lot of schools take which is to get rid of PE entirely. I think this option is better than that option as PE should be considered core education since exercise is something that kids are going to have to do their entire lives.

Yes, it's probably going too far and we as a society should stop being scared of every little things. Playgrounds worked well when our parents were kids and when we were kids, yes, a kid will occasionally break his arm or leg but that's a part of growing up.

Re:Holy shit?

[Smidge204]

Maybe the parents should take their precious little snowflake to a fucking doctor to check for hear problems if they're that concerned.

Seriously, I'm all for providing a safe environment for kids to play in (those stainless steel slides I had in elementary school put more kids in the nurse's office than anything on hot spring day) but there IS a limit to this.

The devices cost money that is sorely needed for actual education and the PE teachers almost certainly do not have the equipment or training to do anything more significant that call 911. God forbid they DO try to do something and the kid dies anyway. Hello lawsuit!

Have the parents sign a fucking waiver and let the kids run 'till they drop. Seriously.
=Smidge=

Re:Holy shit?

[PopeRatzo]

And in the end, both groups are equally bad.

Actually, that's a corporate-media spread conventional wisdom that's badly mistaken. \

They are not "equally as bad". Not when one side wants to stop vaccinations and science education.

Re:Holy shit?

[Foobar of Borg]

I don't know about that... I'm sure there was SOME reason someone was filming all those guys at Abu Ghraib getting sticks shoved up their asses and electrodes strapped to their balls.

You see, it works like this. Much like the late Strom Thurmond, they do get boners over brown and black people. But, because of their ideology, they are not supposed to. So, they pretend they don't and enact (or at least try to enact) strict laws against that sort of thing. And then they get caught knocking up brown and black women. Kind of like with some of the virulently anti-homosexual Republicans. They tend to be closeted, or at least covered, homosexuals. There's nothing wrong with a white person liking black and brown people, or with homosexuals, but the Republicans really should stop trying to outlaw all this considering the people in their own party.

Re:Holy shit?

[Kell Bengal]

You'll find many of the truths we hold to be self-evident depend largely upon one's point of view.

Paranoid

[Misanthrope]

They're probably just going to monitor heart rate to optimize aerobic exercise. At a certain point if your heart is beating too fast you'll end up in anaerobic mode.
http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=4736

Re:Paranoid

[Renraku]

Paranoia, yes, but on who's part?

Surely the school didn't purchase a bunch of new heart monitors because it might improve the calorie-burning of their students. Most likely what happened was that some kid presented with a previously-undetected heart defect and the school got sued. Now they're instating this to make sure that if someone else comes in with a funky rhythm, they can be taken to the hospital or allowed to rest as needed.

On an even more paranoid note, wouldn't the presence of these heart monitors open them up for these lawsuits to begin with? "Well, Johnny was WEARING a heart monitor when his heart stopped! The doctors said that there was probably some kind of variation in the heart's rhythm, and the school didn't detect OR treat it until it was too late! They LET our child die!"

Re:Paranoid

[Otter]

Back in the olden days, we used to monitor our pulses in gym class using a finger and a clock. No, there's nothing suspicious about this, and anyone who used common equipment in gym should understand the benefit of buying your own strap instead of digging through a box to find the least sweaty one from the period before.

Troll?

[Nimey]

This would be a pretty good troll posting. Nicely done, if so.

Paranoid

[Ben Newman]

I vote paranoid. In all the places I've heard of this used its only used as a way for the students to collect their own information and to monitor themselves and their own heart rate. These devices are generally only heart rate monitors, in no way are they designed to notice an arrhythmia, and I've never heard of the data being collected in any way. Besides since they've asked you to purchase the equipment, you would be better able to know exactly what the capabilities of the model you were asked to buy then a bunch of random Slashdotters. Stop reading the site and do some research.

Re:Well

[broken_chaos]

Likely it's identical to the device that comes with/works with some treadmills. It detects BPM (beats per minute) and that's pretty much it. That's about all the data that's useful for pure exercise monitoring anyway. If this is a public middle school and they're just asking you to buy the strap and not the device, then that's likely the most sophisticated they could afford, even if there was 'evil' motivations behind it. Seen physical education budgets lately?

So yeah, just a little paranoid...

holy stupid, batman

[Lord Ender]

My tinfoil-hat concern is that the heart rate data will be tied to each child, then archived and eventually used for/against them down the road when applying for insurance, high-stress jobs, etc. '

This is beyond tinfoil. This is the among the stupidest things I've ever read as an ask slashdot. It just goes to show that parental instincts can turn intelligent humans into frightened, protective, stupid animals.

Submitter: A heart rate monitor is just a more accurate way of measuring someone's pulse. Have you ever exercised in your life? Did you put your fingers to your neck to check your pulse? This is the same thing, but with more accurate reading. And it beeps if your heart rate gets too high so you know to slow down.

Do some damn research and try to collect your brains back into your skull. The big scary world isn't trying to ruin your little darling by checking his pulse.

You've just not experienced it

[Bruce Perens]

Have you ever been rejected for family medical coverage because your child had a urinary infection once, and a test to make sure it wasn't serious? I have.

Re:You've just not experienced it

[Bruce Perens]

Well, I think we'd be doing a lot better on health care reform right now if we hadn't first had to inject cash into financial companies that then paid it to underperforming staff as bonuses, and if we hadn't had to support auto manufacturers that kept making big inefficient and unreliable cars despite nearly thirty years of perception of their lagging foreign concerns, and if we hadn't entered some stupid wars.

That said, I'm for the public option. I am having a lot of trouble reconciling the responsibility of a private medical coverage firm to its stockholders vs. its responsibility to the public. We don't have very many for-profit fire departments in the United States any longer, although that was once the norm. Wonder why?

Re:Insurance is for risks, not certainties

[Bruce Perens]

Well, he didn't have an existing illness. But you have just explained, pretty well, why insurance companies should not be allowed to be involved in individual medical coverage. Because it's not in their interest to cover sick people! I hope all of the folks who are against the public option get for-profit fire departments in their towns.

Not spending much time in gyms, are you?

[Animats]

From the comments, I suspect that most Slashdot readers don't spend much time in gyms.

Heart rate monitors are very useful. They tell you what resistance level you should be using on the cardio machines. Some of the fancier cardio machines read your heart rate and automatically adjust the resistance level to keep your heart rate in the training zone.

Great for obese kids. And adults. It fine-tunes their workout to a level they can handle while preventing goofing off.

If the school is really doing that, good for them. They're doing it right.

WTF?

[Das Auge]

What the fuck are you babbling about?

When did the user that submitted the article ever mention anything about politics? Or race? The submitter is concerned with ramifications regarding personal rights.

You're the sort of person who just sits around waiting for anything even similar to a discussion so you can spew out your political beliefs and try to act holier-than-thou.

There's the running joke about slashdotters living in their parents basements and not having a life, but you really don't seem to a have a life. So put down the moral superiority and go get one.

Re:Insurance is for risks, not certainties

[Speare]

Scenario:

* Kid has tiny routine temporary infection. It's resolved.

* Parent wants to insure kid, wife, self, against costs of broken arms, car accidents, heart attacks, etc.

* Insurance company goes on data mining expedition, sees tiny temporary infection in past, denies whole family coverage for all health issues.

Now do you see the fallacy in your argument?