Gamifying Weight Loss: How Pokemon Go Can Motivate You to Shed Pounds
As someone who was always interested in technology from a young age, I have always interacted with tech on a day to day basis. For the past couple of years I struggled with losing weight. I tried a lot of things from going to the gym for lifting weights and using the treadmill, dieting and running. I was never able to lose weight and keep the consistency. It wasn’t until the start of 2020 when my doctor asked if I had any health goals and I quickly responded with “getting 10,000 steps a day” without having a plan to achieve this. I got home and I remembered about an app back in 2016 known as “Pokemon Go” by Niantic labs.
Niantic is a world renowned for augmented reality also known as AR and on their homepage they have a goal for AR to improve people’s life, “What if augmented reality could make us better? Could it nudge us off the couch for a Saturday in the park?”. Besides the augmented reality, the thing I like about this application is how it tracks your steps weekly and gives you rewards and incentives through how many miles you walk. You can find pokemon and collect items at stops in different locations and the only way to move in the game is by walking. This gamification of healthy activities has really been pivotal for my weight loss and I know that it can do the same for others.
In the research paper, “Social Incentives and Gamification to Promote Weight Loss: The Lose it Randomized, Controlled Trial” defined Gamification as “the use of game design elements, such as points and levels and is increasingly being used in digital health interventions to promote behavior change, such as weight loss and physical activity”. The goal was to see a change of weight at 24 weeks and then again at 36 weeks. During this intervention period they wanted the participants to achieve their step goals which were 10,000 steps. After the 36 weeks they found that, “The use of digital health devices to track health behaviors with a partner led to significant weight loss through 36 weeks, particularly among teammates that lived together”. However they found out that gamification alone was not effective at promoting weight loss when compared to control. Their conclusion for future studies was to “test different ways to design the gamification interventions to better leverage strong social connections and to better engage clinicians.”. Coming to this conclusion makes sense because humans are inherently a social creature and doing things together motivates us to continue especially when keeping up goals that include losing weight and or dieting.
In today’s society according to the Mayo Clinic, “The average American walks 3,000 to 4,000 steps a day, or roughly 1.5 to 2 miles” and it makes sense why obesity is on the rise throughout the modern world. Now going back to 2020 when I made the declaration to my doctor that It sounded ambitious but I did sometime similar to what the Mayo Clinic recommends, “You can work up towards the goal of 10,000 steps by aiming to add 1,000 extra steps a day every two weeks”. However that declaration did not stay at the doctor’s office but I made sure to let my friends and family know so that I could have more accountability and from time to time they would join me on my walks. I think this really helped because in the past when I initially wanted to lose weight it was a solo effort and it was hard to keep consistent but this time happened at an opportune time at the start of the pandemic and we had more time to yourself and it was one way for my family and I to stay active and a way for my friends and I could connect by comparing our steps.
We all have Dr Yoshiro Hantano to thank, he was a Japanese professor at Kyushu University of Health and Welfare. At the time he was researching how to combat obesity and due to this research the modern Fitness Tracker was made, “first surfaced in 1965 with the Manpo-kei, which translates to ‘10,000 steps meter’. He posited that 10,000 steps provided the proper balance of caloric intake and activity-based calorie expenditure to maintain a healthy body”. Since the Manpo-kei the 10,000 steps a day metric has been ingrained to our global consciousness with most fitness watches and applications has it as their daily fitness goal. Although some more recent research has shown that 15,000 steps a day is the recommended number, modern companies still use it. If we look at Apple which is one of the most popular fitness watch companies today, back in 2015 with the release of their 1st generation Apple watch generated an outstanding sales of $9 billion.
In 2021, the global wearables market which includes “smartwatches, fitness trackers, augmented and virtual reality headsets and wearable cameras” was worth $52.1B and wrist-wear was the largest share with “more than 48.90% of the overall revenue”. The mass adoption of wearables technology has been driven by “AI and AR technologies enable manufacturers to add new advanced features to their products”. Also part of this growth comes from the adoption by healthcare industries due to the “COVID-19 pandemic is rising as it offers several advantages and benefits to both patients and healthcare providers, which includes real-time health monitoring of vital statistics and earlier detection of disease or risk of a significant health event.” The great thing about having these tracking devices is that people have a lot of access to this, even if they are not a part of the group of people who own a smartwatches/fitness trackers most people own smartphones which have similar technologies inside them. If individuals are able of self-monitoring their physical activity and are comfortable talking with their healthcare providers about the given data
In the research paper “Does self-monitoring diet and physical activity behaviors using digital technology support adults with obesity or overweight to lose weight? A systematic literature with meta-analysis”, found that digital self-monitoring both physical activity and diet aids with weight loss compared to not monitoring both these behaviors had positive outcomes at least for the short term. The participants of this research are adults 18 and over that are overweight and or obese and the main findings of the research found that” digital self-monitoring of behaviors as an effective and low cost solution to tackle obesity and overweight”. This research has huge public health implications because people pay for a gym membership every month without ever stepping a foot in the gym. However with a low cost smart device or your own smartphone you can simply walk outside.
I have an iphone and the great thing about it is the health app automatically tracks your steps and with the IOS app you can download other fitness apps. So I chose to use pokemon go instead of purchasing a separate device like a fitbit or apple watch or foregoing a gym membership. I have been a Pokemon fan since I was a child so having artificial reality to bring these creatures to life and there are missions you get through Professor Willow. Some of the missions can be to go catch a certain amount of Pokemon, to spin a couple of Pokestops which can be found through the map and can only be activated by standing near it in real life and to hatching eggs of different rarity which you have to walk to hatch.
I always thought that Pokemon Go was a great app and I first played it back in 2016 when it was released globally. At that time I was studying abroad in Italy and had limited data but my classmates and I would play when we had data. Since I did not want to waste my data plan while I was abroad I did not get to play as much as I would like, so unfortunately I forgot about it when returning back home and as mentioned earlier it wasn’t until the pandemic when I started using it again. My siblings had it but they were not as invested in the app as I was and my friends did not have the app but I still want to stay connected and share my progress. I would go on walks daily and when I got my notification weekly on the app I would go to the health app and share the data with my family and text it to my friends. We would compete and encourage each other to get to 10,000 steps.
According to the research, “Influence of Pokemon Go on Physical Activity: Study and Implications” from the Computer Science Department of Stanford University and Microsoft Research found that “Pokemon Go leads to significant increases in physical activity over a period of 30 days, with particularly engaged users increasing their activity by 1473 steps a day on average, a more than 25% increase compared with their prior activity level”. The objective of the research was to just quantify the “impact of Pokemon Go on physical activity” so if they had an objective to see if there would be an increase in steps I would conclude that this result would be higher. This conclusion can be made because “In the short time span of the study, we estimated that Pokemon Go has added a total of 144 billion steps to US physical activity”.
The results of the data was not discriminatory because they found that Pokemon Go was able to get all participants no matter the gender, age, weight status and prior activity levels were able to increase physical activity through the gamification and the community that this app brings. At my old job and here at the University of Washington Bothell, I have been able to form friendships that might have not happened otherwise. I believe that having a community of people using this fitness app has really helped me with keeping the consistency.
Now during fall 2022, I have been slacking off on my fitness goals and I have been gaining weight again because of the stress of going back to class full time. I have spent less time walking outside than I did during the summer. I made sure during the summer when I was in my coding bootcamp to walk and hike so that I would not be burnt out from programming. I made plans to go hiking at Poo Poo point once a week with a friend and we when we had more time available to go on a bigger hike. I did the same with my father and mentor because I wanted to keep up the pace. However it is colder and I commute to school which cuts down on my time to keep active. However I make sure to walk around campus before I go home because we have a nice walking path. It has been more difficult to do this though with daylight saving because it gets darker quicker so I have to recalibrate my plan and make sure that I maintain a diet during the meantime.
I feel like this is a great opportunity to find out how I can live a better data driven life, so writing this paper has really helped me with deciding what to do next. I will be planning to go to the gym and join it with Pokemon Go and dieting. I will continue with keeping the community that I have made with family and friends so that we can encourage each other.
Work Cited
Althoff, Tim, et al. “Influence of Pokémon Go on Physical Activity: Study and Implications.” Journal of Medical Internet Research, vol. 18, no. 12, 2016, https://doi.org/10.2196/jmir.6759.
Berry, Rhiannon, et al. “Does Self‐Monitoring Diet and Physical Activity Behaviors Using Digital Technology Support Adults with Obesity or Overweight to Lose Weight? A Systematic Literature Review with Meta‐Analysis.” Obesity Reviews, vol. 22, no. 10, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1111/obr.13306.
Kurtzman, Gregory W., et al. “Social Incentives and Gamification to Promote Weight Loss: The Lose It Randomized, Controlled Trial.” Journal of General Internal Medicine, vol. 33, no. 10, 2018, pp. 1669–1675., https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-018-4552-1.
Douglas- Walton, Josh. “A Study of Fitness Trackers and Wearables.” HFE, 20 May 2020, https://www.hfe.co.uk/blog/a-study-of-fitness-trackers-and-wearables/#:~:text=Fitness%20trackers%2C%20as%20we%20know,time%20how%20to%20combat%20obesity.
Niantic Labs, https://nianticlabs.com/?hl=en.
Wearable Technology Market Size, Share & Trends Report 2030, https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/wearable-technology-market#:~:text=Report%20Overview,consumers%20is%20driving%20industry%20growth.
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