By Alesha Capone
An innovative plan to develop an “exercise bingo” game for senior citizens in Wyndham has received a $10,000 grant from the Heart Foundation.
IPC Health’s plan to create a modified game of bingo, named binGO MOVE, has been allocated the funding under the Heart Foundation’s 2020 Active Australia Innovation Challenge.
The challenge asked tertiary institutions, schools, councils and other organisations to submit creative ideas for projects to get people moving, with 10 winners – including binGO MOVE –announced last week.
IPC health’s senior manager of allied health, Sebastian Buccheri, said binGO MOVE was a 60-to-90 minute-long online bingo game.
“When a number is called out, there is an exercise attributed to that number – for example, 11 could be something related to legs, such as marching on the spot, or 25 could involve reaching for the sky or similar,” he said.
Mr Buccheri said the inspiration for binGO MOVE came from IPC Health’s cardiac rehabilitation program and the notion that some seniors had declining levels of exercise, pre-COVID.
“So we had the idea ‘How can we make bingo more active?'” he said.
“We were spurred on by COVID-19, when people were at home in lockdown and getting less socialisation, and also the fact that some adults in Wyndham are also less active.”
IPC Health staff, allied health staff, exercise physiologists and physiotherapists will help to develop binGO MOVE’s exercises and to run the game.
Mr Buccheri said IPC would also have the option of running binGO MOVE in a face-to-face environment, and will be looking at ways to do this in a COVID Safe manner over the next few months.
IPC Health is hoping to complete the first trial phase of binGO MOVE with a small group of participants at its Hoppers Crossing and Wyndham Vale sites by March or April.
BinGO MOVE may be expanded to IPC’s other sites in the west in the future.
