Cognitive Effects of Exercise in a Workplace Setting
Open Access
- Author:
- Hatzell, Johanna Gretchen
- Area of Honors:
- Industrial Engineering
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Andris Freivalds, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Paul M Griffin, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Obesity
Workplace
Exercise
DeskCycle - Abstract:
- Obesity has increased almost three-fold since the 1960s (Ogden et al., 2010). In 1960, 13.4% of the American public ages 20-74 were obese (Ogden et al., 2010). As of 2008, the prevalence of obesity in the United States for adults ages 20-74 has increased to 34.3% (Ogden et al., 2010). A large contributing factor to obesity is that people maintain sedentary lifestyles. People are sitting on their way to the office, all day at work, and they go home and relax by watching TV. One way to increase activity during the day is to incorporate exercise in the workplace setting. This research investigated the cognitive effects of incorporating exercise into the workplace. For this research, a under the desk elliptical, called the DeskCycle was used (2014, Specifications). Having participants complete cognitive office tasks while using the DeskCycle tested the feasibility of incorporating exercise into the workplace. The participants completed a reading comprehension task and typing task while sitting, pedaling at a low speed (11 mph), and pedaling at a high speed (22 mph). Testing cognition under multiple conditions will determine the effect of exercise on work completed in an office setting. Reading accuracy and Adjusted Words Per Minute (AWPM) was recorded during the experiment. ANOVA analysis was done on the results of the experiments using Minitab. The result of the one-way ANOVA analysis for the Reading Accuracy versus the Cycling Rate under the three conditions was that there was no significant relationship. The ANOVA analysis of the results of the AWPM versus Cycle Rate also reported no significance. However, when a General Linear Model was completed a significant relationship between AWPM and cycle rate was seen. This research has looked at the cognitive effects of exercise in the workplace, but more research needs to be done with additional participants in order to definitely determine the effects of cycling while completing other cognitive workplace tasks.