Study estimates Pokémon Go has added over 144 billion steps to US physical activity - NeoGAF

[the-pi-guy]

Study estimates Pokémon Go has added over 144 billion steps to US physical activity - NeoGAF

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/2...l_activity.phphttps://www.jmir.org/article/viewFile/jmir_v18i12e315/2 credit to zhugeex for rting this

"Highly engaged users were almost 3 times as likely to meet official activity guidelines in the 30 days after starting to play Pokémon Go compared with that before. If this user engagement could be sustained, Pokémon Go would have the potential to measurably affect US life expectancy."

 

Put simply, the paper posits -- based on a three-month study of ~32,000 wearers of Microsoft fitness trackers conducted jointly by Microsoft Research and Stanford University researchers -- that interest in playing Pokemon Go correlates with an increase in physical activity, and that greater interest is often linked to even greater boosts in exercise. This in turn leads researchers to suggest that regular play of Pokemon Go (or games like it) could meaningfully improve public health. "We studied the effect of Pokémon Go on physical activity through a combination of large-scale wearable sensor data with search engine logs and showed that the game leads to significant increases in physical activity over a period of 30 days, particularly with the engaged users increasing their average activity by 1473 steps a day or 26 percent," reads an excerpt of the paper.  "Based on our findings, we estimate that the game has already added an estimated 144 billion steps to US physical activity. If engagement with Pokémon Go could be sustained over the lifetime of its many users, we estimate that the game would add an estimated 2.825 million years of additional lifetime to its US users " However, as the paper itself points out, there are some meaningful caveats to this data. Most notably, the study only looked at anonymized data collected by Microsoft -- it did not directly interview any of the people studied, and it basically had to make very educated guesses about which participants were actually playing Pokemon Go (as opposed to say, running searches to find out what the game was and why everyone was talking about it.)

 

that's a lot of pidgey eggs
 

[Legend]

Nice

[Max King of the Wild]

I call bullishit. It helped people drive while using their phones

[Xbro]

I call bullishit. It helped people drive while using their phones

Except the steps didn't count if you were going over 10 miles per hour.

[Max King of the Wild]

Except the steps didn't count if you were going over 10 miles per hour.

Little do you know...