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MOVE YOUR MET: DCU and AVIVA HEALTH FITNESS INNOVATION

Move Your MET App is a new mobile application created by TEKenable in partnership with Aviva Health, the Nutrition & Health Foundation (NHF) and Professor Niall Moyna, Head of the School of Health and Human Performance at Dublin City University (DCU). The App can be used by individuals of any fitness level and participants in the Aviva Workplace Fitness Challenge 2016 where it is being used to assess which company can improve the most within a 6 week period. The App aims to put a number on your fitness by calculating your “met” (metabolic equivalent). The aim of the challenge is to provide a programme that supports Ireland’s workforce to become fitter and healthier by increasing levels of physical activity in the workplace.

A MET is the unit used to estimate the metabolic cost of an action. One MET is defined as your resting metabolic rate, in other words the amount of oxygen you use while at rest. As stated by Prof. Niall Moyna “gradual, maintained increases in one’s MET can have a tremendous impact on both your physical and mental health”. This is just one of the many reasons for such an interest across Ireland following the App’s involvement in RTE’s national broadcast, Operation Transformation, of which Professor Niall Moyna and his team assess the leaders fitness at the School of Health and Human Performance’s High Performance Physiological Laboratory.

The popularity of this App was underlined with over 50,000 downloads since going live earlier on January 5th 2016.  Another major benefit of this app to other tracking devices is that it is free. Public health is something the School of Health and Human Performance casts a critical eye on. A healthy lifestyle should be applicable to everyone and by having a cost free application to track your fitness and with an App endorsed by Prof. Niall Moyna, the Nutrition & Health Foundation and Aviva Health the steps are being made to improving the overall lifestyle of Ireland’s workforce. Prof. Moyna reiterates his passion for this at the opening of the Aviva Workplace Fitness Challenge 2016 stating how “exercise is medicine, indeed if it could be prescribed as a pill it would be the most prescribed medication in the world”, “we need to find a way to incorporate it into our daily life” this successful App, with its growing popularity certainly aids in this aspiration.