One of the top sports technology programs in the U.K. may have found a way to put the “play” back in playgrounds.

Play equipment manufacturer Playdale challenged the U.K.’s Sports Technology Institute at Loughborough University to design a playing field that encourages children to exercise at a high intensity.

Insititute Director Professor Mike Caine, Steve Rothberg, Loughborough’s dean of engineering, and Loughborough PhD candidate Phil Hodgkins, all agreed to lend their design and engineering expertise.

“There’s definitely a real problem with kids more sedentary lifestyles and/or having poor dietary habits,” Caine said. “I think anybody, parents or otherwise, is frustrated by that.”

After three years, the group came up with i.play, a solar-powered, interactive playground system. Set on a circular surface with three cylindrical-shaped legs placed equal distances apart, the legs twist and snake above the ground before meeting in the middle of the circle. On each of the legs are activity switches placed at low, medium and high heights that, depending on the switch, are activated by being pressed, pulled, cranked, or twisted.

The i.play issues voice commands, notifying the player to activate one of the switches. LED lights placed on each switch flash to indicate which switch must be activated. Similar to a video game, the i.play also scores each game. The faster switches are activated with high scores. Players are given three lives per game which are lost when the player takes too long to activate a switch or activates the wrong one.

LED lights and voice commands give visually and hearing impaired players the opportunity to play. The different heights of the switches also help include players restricted to a wheelchair.

“We’re looking at how we can provide stimulus to get all sorts of players active,” Hodgkins said.

The game also offers multiplayer games of up to six people. One game works by using a “follow-the-leader” concept in which the first player creates a sequence hitting switches in a random order. The next players must copy the sequence exactly, or lose their place in the game.

“Another multiplayer game is sort of like tag. You can play on the game and when it says “tag” you can tag your friends and they can go in and play for a few minutes,” Hodgkins said. “So it’s kind of like intermittent play.”

“Stealth exercise” is at the heart of i.play technology. Caine explains that by making the i.play interesting, children will push the boundaries of their athletic abilities to improve their score.

“This distracts children from the discomfort of high intensity exercise, making them more likely to exercise longer or harder,” Caine said.

Barry Leahey, director of Playdale, said the idea for developing a new playground came from a conversation with a colleague who had just been to the world’s largest fitness and wellness exhibition in Essen, Germany.

“He said there was a lot of kids’ fitness gym equipment. We started talking, saying children shouldn’t be using gym equipment […] They should be out in the playground,” Leahey said. “So we thought there was some mileage in there because going back three, four years, the obesity topic was getting big news.”

Before Playdale created the i.play equipment, Leahey knew that it needed to be robust to stand up in public spaces.

“We are just a bunch of hooligans over [in the U.K.]. People like to wreck stuff all the time,” Leahey said. “But we’ve been manufacturing play equipment for over 30 years so we know how to make [it durable].”

Caine admits that while there were some skeptics, the response to the i.play has been tremendous.

In 2006, Caine won a business innovation award for the i.play at the Internationale Fachmesse für Sportartikel und Sportmode (ISPO) conference in Munich, beating out sports equipment companies like Adidas.

“There’s now 35 in the ground and we’ve quoted over $12 million in business,” said Leahey. “To think that one unit [costs] $50,000, that’s 240 units quoted for people interested in buying one for the U.K.”

Currently there are no i.plays in Canada, but that may change in the not so distant future.

“Funny enough we just [recently] had someone from Canada contact me about a distributor,” said Leahey.