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?

[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?

[antifoidulus]

Private health insurance does that to a person. The system in the US is screwed up beyond all repair. For instance, if a company finds out that you or anyone in your immediate family has any medical problems that ends up being a HUGE strike against you. Legally they cannot ask such questions, but they have ways of finding out(from illegal but common searches to just seeing if you have any obvious health issues when you show up to the interview).

US health insurance is KILLING US competitiveness abroad(not to mention the insanely top-heavy structure of US businesses, but thats another conversation). The sheer amount of cost(both for the insurance and the staff to administer it) about nullifies the cost advantages US workers have over European workers(who have higher taxes associated with them, but no health insurance), and makes Canadian workers look extremely attractive(health insurance is covered, but unlike Europeans they can actually be fired without spending massive amounts of time and money filling out pointless paperwork to get rid of a paperweight).

Re:Holy shit?

[guyfawkes-11-5]

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.

I use a HRM all the time while running or biking. Its a good way to give you feedback on your exertion level, and will allow the kids to learn more about max heart rate, threshold level etc. I would want my own band also, rather than some sopping wet band from the previous gym class. Unless they spring for the higher end moniors, the data is not downloadable and is not in any fashion similar to an EKG that would be able to determine an arrythmia.

Re:Holy shit?

[jcr]

Don't be afraid to tell your little shits when they're being little shits.

Ok then: you're being an obnoxious little shit.

Glad I could help.

-jcr

Re:Holy shit?

[GMFTatsujin]

I'm betting it's not even that and it's just a heart rate monitor to improve the quality of aerobic exercise. I concur.

I worked as a technical writer for a place that made HRMs. We sold to pro athletes, gyms, personal trainers, Navy seals, fitness enthusiasts of every stripe... we even had a version of the product made especially for training race horses. It was pretty cool.

I was surprised at what a difference using one of those things made in my *own* ability to exercise. I'm an overweight writing nerd, but man: there's nothing like beeping, booping technology to get my interest. Using an HRM is like keeping score on a video game. Or playing the tomagotchi game with your body as the avatar. Or something.

Something fun and trackable, anyway.

The HRM went a long way toward getting me off my butt and dropping pounds because it provided metrics and feedback that I could understand and affect. That's more than my "hustle! hustle! hustle!" school coach ever managed to do.

All this being said: I doubt that the information on your kid is going to be recorded for more than 9 weeks, honestly. There are, like, serious LAWS about that information getting off campus, too. Anybody who is into selling kids' info to Nefarious Businesses Incorporated is going to have access to a lot more dirt than just a weird blip on your child's HRM.

That HRM, by the way, is certainly *not* medically diagnostic in quality. I'd be surprised if it did more than note the heart rate at 1 second intervals and track the changes over time. It *might* try to estimate a general sense of fitness on the heart, but it will, at best, give you a meaningless number on a scale from "is this thing on?" to "cybernetically enhanced athlete trained atop the Himalayas from birth."

No need to worry. The poster's school's coach is probably just trying to do a great job at keeping the kids in his care interested in physical fitness. I applaud him/her for it.

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?

[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]

(Conservatives do it to adults, not children.)

You must not have heard the most recent fooferall about how the Barack Osama gummint is trying to vaccinate our kids for H1N1 and shoot Gardisil into our daughter's untouched vaginas.

And what about "President" Hussein bin Obama trying to brainwash our kids with commie-nazi notions about staying in school and working hard?

He can have my daughter's vagina when he wrests it from my cold, dead hands.

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?

[jeffporcaro]

I'm a cardiologist; we use heart rate as a threshold when doing stress testing, but otherwise it has limited utility in measuring "exertion level." The Maximal Predicted Heart Rate [MPHR] was established in the late '60s as an observation, not a true prediction; a small sample of people was observed exercising to their subjective "maximum," and those rates were plotted. There was enormous variability; the slope of MPHR was simply the line of best fit from the scatterplot, and was estimated by the authors of the original article to likely be accurate within 30 points in either direction. A particular person's maximal heart rate is impossible to predict within any meaningful accuracy; obviously, the derived slope is even sloppy for large populations. There are many many "experts" with theories regarding what percentage of MPHR you should achieve and for how long in order to get aerobic benefit - there is almost no science on the subject. Currently in vogue (and to my eye, at least as reasonable as anything based on heart rate) is the Borg Scale of Perceived Exertion. Basically, work to a level where you consistently feel like you're exerting yourself - that's how you get feedback on your exertion level. For an excellent discussion of this, see Gina Kolata's book Ultimate Fitness (almost 10 years old, still well-researched and interesting). There's an enormous amount of misinformation and pseudoscience out there.

Re:Holy shit?

[Lemmy Caution]

OK, stories like this reveal a fascinating contradiction.

The original question expressed concern that a child's heart rate and other health info would be used to either deny them health insurance or force them into a higher risk pool.

But the libertarian presumption is that free markets with full information work better for everyone involved. The insurers want information that will enable them to remove expensive-to-insure people from coverage where possible, or at least to put them in a much more expensive pool. While they want perfect information (to make insuring people as low-risk and profitable as possible,) clearly the parents of kids who may have pre-existing conditions do not want that information available. Wouldn't the libertarian approach be to allow insurers to take every possible measure to get that information out into the open, so that they can tier insurance appropriately? Doesn't that mean that people who are loath to share their information are probably "free-riding" on lower-risk populations? Wouldn't that make the refusal of information (such as heart rates, etc.) a reasonable basis for refusing insurance, or at least charging a higher premium for it?

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.

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.

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.