Most universities care about the health of their student body, but some go above and beyond others. Oral Roberts University, a religious school based in Tulsa, Okla., now requires students to wear Fitbit fitness bands. That’s reportedly starting with the incoming freshmen class of 900.
In the past, Oral Roberts reportedly required students to manually keep track of their fitness. That meant jotting down when you were running and so on, and all of this was given points. Think of it like counting calories, but slightly more abstract. That fitness tracking then figured into health and physical education grades at the university.
That’s still the case — with grades being attached to fitness requirements — but the idea is that requiring the incoming class to use Fitbits will essentially automate the whole process. Gone are the days of keeping track of everything manually, as is the ability to easily fudge those numbers. It’s a bit more difficult to cheat with a Fitbit.
According to the Washington Post, Oral Roberts will be receiving data from their students’ Fitbits, but they’re well aware of privacy concerns associated with all of this — and have seemingly received no complaints about it. Those Fitbits are intended to only send data based on the number of steps each student takes as well as their heart rate information. Both of those statistics are now part of the school’s requirements.
The university reportedly requires students to take an average of 10,000 steps per day as well as 150 total minutes of “intense activity” a week. The latter of those is apparently calculated due to the previously-mentioned heart rate data that the school collects. This collection is reportedly turned off when the semester is over, but that seems like a small consolation to constantly being monitored.
Via: The Verge
