Partners Healthcare

The obesity epidemic facing our entire country has been particularly magnified in our underserved communities, where it’s often harder and more expensive for residents to obtain fresh fruits and vegetables than fast-food value meals. Partners HealthCare is working to develop creative solutions to this problem within those communities most affected by it, using available technology to work with schools and parents to teach local school children about the importance of activity and diet. Through a relatively simple and inexpensive initiative, we are helping to lay the foundation for a healthier generation.

The Step it Up Program represents the combined efforts of Partners’ Center for Connected Health, Partners Community Benefit and DotWell to offer smart pedometers to second, third and fourth-graders at two Dorchester public schools. Over 170 students and their teachers have been participating in this 16-week pilot program, clipping smart pedometers onto their shoes to record the number of steps taken. As they walk about the school, small computer-linked antennae pick up the step counts and forward them to a database.

Each Friday, students receive a personalized Step Activity report, including age-appropriate health and nutrition information. In addition, each classroom’s aggregate step data is used in a competition to see if one classroom can “walk across America” faster than another. This competition has proven to be a great motivator; the children are currently walking an average of 3,200 steps per day, with some walking up to 10,000 steps. So far, the feedback from students and teachers has been very positive, and if the evaluation results also prove positive, we will explore the possibility of broadening participation to include more schools.

This initiative is the first of its kind, measuring the impact that a technology-enabled “connected health” program can have on helping school-aged children become fit and active. Our ultimate hope is that we’ll help to inspire a generation of citizens to fully appreciate the importance of activity and how it leads to improved health. It’s a small example of Partners’ dedication to reach out to local communities – particularly those most underserved – and implement technology in a tactical and intuitive way to address such broader societal health problems as obesity.