Encouraging overweight students with intellectual disability to engage in walking/running by using a dance pad combined with a LEGO® Train

ABSTRACT

Most individuals with intellectual disability (ID) lack the motivation and willingness to do exercise on their own. The purpose of this study was to apply the response-stimulation strategy to encourage three overweight students with ID to engage in walking/running. This was a preliminary study to implement the strategy by using a dance pad combined with a LEGO® Train. The LEGO® Train was used as the stimulation to motivate the participants and a dance pad was used to detect the participants’ walking/running activity in order to trigger the LEGO® Train. This study adopted a multiple probe design across participants, including one baseline phase and two intervention phases. The experimental results show that the three participants performed a greater number of walking/running steps during the intervention phases, compared to the baseline phase. The findings demonstrate that a dance pad combined with the LEGO® Train was a feasible motivator to increase the participants’ willingness to perform walking/running on their own.

KEYWORDS:

• response-stimulation strategy
• intellectual disability
• dance pad, LEGO® Train
• overweight students

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.