The (pre)school environment is an important setting to improve children's health. Especially, the (pre)school playground provides a major opportunity to intervene. This review presents an overview of the existing evidence on the value of both school and preschool playgrounds on children's health in terms of physical activity, cognitive and social outcomes. In addition, we aimed to identify whic...

AIMS Worldwide levels of daily physical activity (PA) in children are low. This has negative health consequences. Schools have been recognised as key settings to promote PA. This study evaluates the effectiveness of the playground programme PLAYgrounds on increasing PA. METHODS PLAYgrounds was evaluated by a controlled trial, with a follow-up during one school year (10 months). Accelerometer ...

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the transport and environmental variables affecting individual usage of playgrounds, with a focus on cultural differences. The paper is based on a survey, which was carried out in Haifa, the third largest city in Israel. The results indicate significant differences between Jewish and Arab populations regarding frequency of playground visits and the ext...

The amount of energy dissipated away from or returned to a child falling onto a surface will influence fracture risk but is not considered in current standards for playground impact-attenuating surfaces. A two-mass rheological computer simulation was used to model energy flow within the wrist and surface during hand impact with playground surfaces, and the potential of this approach to provide ...

BACKGROUND The research sought to find the salient perceived characteristics of playgrounds for African-American children and their parents, and to test effects of changes in those characteristics on playground choice. METHODS Thirty-one African-American children and their parents sorted 15 photographs of playgrounds for similarity. Nonmetric multidimensional scaling on the similarity scores ...

OBJECTIVES A community intervention trial was carried out to evaluate the relative effectiveness of two methods of reducing playground hazards in schools. The study hypotheses were: (1) a health promotion programme addressing barriers to implementing the New Zealand Playground Safety Standard will reduce playground hazards and (2) the intervention programme will be more successful than providin...

OBJECTIVES To present the development of a novel multidisciplinary method to investigate physical risk factors for playground related arm fracture. RATIONALE Previous playground injury research has been limited in its ability to determine risk factors for arm fractures, despite their common and costly occurrence. Biomechanical studies have focused exclusively on head injury. Few epidemiologic...

BACKGROUND Rapid urbanization and unplanned population development can be detrimental to the safety of citizens, with children being a particularly vulnerable social group. In this review, we assess childhood playground injuries and suggest safety mechanisms which could be incorporated into playground planning. METHODS Inclusion criteria were "children" as the focus group, "playground" as the...