Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Physical activity has many benefits and is one of the cheapest and simplest ways to reduce the impact of chronic diseases that cost Canadian economy millions of dollars each year. Despite this evidence, physical inactivity is very prevalent among Canadians. Over the years, many physical activity interventions have been implemented but failed to produce major changes. Thus, to enable a population-wide change, a new approach has gained moment: active living interventions. The goal of these interventions is to modify the built environment that surrounds us to facilitate us to move more and sit less. For example, an active living intervention could be the creation of more sidewalks for people to walk. However, one factor that is consistently ignored in developing these interventions is the role played by weather. For example, how we use a sidewalk will depend on how safe or unsafe we feel in using a sidewalk in different seasons. Modifying built environment without considering weather in all seasons will only be partially effective. This is especially true in Canada where we see a wide variation of weather in a year, and this variation differs from place to place. So, we need interventions that are specific to each city or town depending on the weather variation encountered in those places. Currently we do not have evidence on how built environment mitigates the detrimental effect of weather to increase opportunities for physical activity. We need to conduct long term country-wide studies which would be quite expensive. Thus, we have devised an innovative method that matches existing physical activity data collected over decades across Canada with place-specific weather data. Such matching will enable us to understand how built environment interacts with weather in different places in Canada to ultimately influence physical activity. Eventually, this method will inform future active living interventions that will help increase the physical activity of Canadians.