Numerous studies have called for population-wide approaches .
Efforts to stimulate physical activity hold opportunity for improving public health. Only 21% of US adults meet official physical activity guidelines (at least 150 minutes a week of physical activity for adults), and less than 30% of US high school students get at least 60 minutes of physical activity every day . Recent analyses estimate that physical inactivity contributes to 5.3 million deaths per year worldwide and that it is responsible for a worldwide economic burden of US $67.5 billion due to health care expenditures and productivity losses . People who are physically active tend to live longer, have lower risk for heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, depression, and some cancers, and are more likely to maintain a healthy weight. Physical activity is critical to human health. “Those who think they have no time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness.” Future studies are needed to investigate potential long-term effects of these applications. In particular, we find that Pokémon Go is able to reach low activity populations, whereas all 4 leading mobile health apps studied in this work largely draw from an already very active population.Ĭonclusions: Mobile apps combining game play with physical activity lead to substantial short-term activity increases and, in contrast to many existing interventions and mobile health apps, have the potential to reach activity-poor populations. Furthermore, Pokémon Go has been able to increase physical activity across men and women of all ages, weight status, and prior activity levels showing this form of game leads to increases in physical activity with significant implications for public health. In the short time span of the study, we estimate that Pokémon Go has added a total of 144 billion steps to US physical activity. Results: We find that Pokémon Go leads to significant increases in physical activity over a period of 30 days, with particularly engaged users (ie, those making multiple search queries for details about game usage) increasing their activity by 1473 steps a day on average, a more than 25% increase compared with their prior activity level ( P<.001). Pokémon Go players are identified through search engine queries and physical activity is measured through accelerometers. Methods: We study the effect of Pokémon Go on physical activity through a combination of signals from large-scale corpora of wearable sensor data and search engine logs for 32,000 Microsoft Band users over a period of 3 months. Objective: The objective of this study was to quantify the impact of Pokémon Go on physical activity. The most recent and salient example of such a game is Pokémon Go, which has reportedly reached tens of millions of users in the United States and worldwide. Although many interventions are found to be ineffective at increasing physical activity or reaching inactive populations, there have been anecdotal reports of increased physical activity due to novel mobile games that embed game play in the physical world. Although this knowledge is widely recognized, adults and children in many countries around the world do not get recommended amounts of physical activity.
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