Related Experiment Video
Updated: Apr 17, 2026
Visualization of Intensity Levels to Reduce the Gap Between Self-Reported and Directly Measured Physical Activity
Published on: March 7, 2019
Sit less, stand more: A randomized point-of-decision prompt intervention to reduce sedentary time
Justin J Lang1, Jessica McNeil2, Mark S Tremblay3
1Healthy Active Living and Obesity Research Group, Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute, Ottawa, ON, Canada; PhD Program in Population Health, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada.
Objective:
To determine if a point-of-decision prompt (PODP) targeting sedentary behaviour influenced the proportion of standing individuals during presentations at an academic conference.
Methods:
Twelve, one-hour groups of presentation sessions (Global Summit on the Physical Activity of Children conference, May 2014) were included in this study; half were randomly assigned to the intervention group and half to the control group. The intervention group was exposed to an oral PODP at the beginning and middle of the presentations. Researchers performed three counts: beginning (e.g. first 10min), middle (e.g. 30-40min), and end (e.g. 50-60min); each count included the number of individuals in the audience and the number of standing individuals.
Results:
A significantly larger proportion of individuals chose to stand during intervention group presentations (16.9±2.0%) compared to control group presentations (10.5±1.5%; chi(2)=7.13; p<0.05).
Conclusions:
This study demonstrated the effectiveness of PODPs at decreasing sedentary behaviour during an academic conference. PODPs are simple, cost-effective interventions that require minimal time commitment, and represent a population health intervention that could reduce sedentary behaviour in a large group setting.
