Catalyst: Can we move beyond fitness trackers to motivate the unmotivated to exercise?

Описание: Read more: https://stanford.io/35atz8s

Most people know they should exercise more, but discovering the right way to motivate them is difficult. An interdisciplinary team of Stanford researchers has taken on that challenge and in the course of their work has conducted the largest ever assessment of physical activity.

“Our goal is to motivate physical activity on a global scale. And the team is producing tools and knowledge that can be deployed at a low cost on a planetary scale to improve both mental health and physical health of millions of individuals,” says Scott Delp, a professor of mechanical engineering and of bioengineering at Stanford, who spoke about the research at the university’s recent Reunion Homecoming Weekend festivities.

Working with a mobile app company, the team gathered minute-by-minute step counts for 2 million people in 100 countries. An important finding of the survey is that there is inequality in activity across populations. When activity inequality is high, women tend to be less active, a condition that shortens their lives, Delp says.

Delp notes that there is no shortage of devices one can use to measure physical activity, but most of the “nudging” by those devices simply doesn’t work. “In most cases, people use physical activity monitors over the short term and then throw them in a drawer,” he says.

One of the team’s key findings came from a study led by psychology professor Alia Crum, who revealed a placebo effect in exercise physiology. A group of subjects took a test that monitors how much oxygen an individual takes in and how much carbon dioxide they put out during intensive exercise. Blood was drawn after the exercise ended and the subjects were asked to return a week later.

When they returned, some of the subjects were told the blood test showed they had a gene that is excellent for fitness; the rest were told they didn’t have it. The subjects who were told they didn’t have the gene performed significantly worse when they redid the exercise test. Those who were told they did have the gene performed at the same level as earlier. “What this demonstrates is that the way you deliver information can have a powerful effect, not just on people’s behavior but on how their bodies respond to physical activity,” Crum says.

Other experiments have shown that personal interventions, even when conducted by a virtual advisor, resulted in subjects adding more than four hours of exercise a week. Also motivating: working out with friends, even online friends.

The researchers plan to share their findings with developers who can then incorporate them into commercial devices and applications. “Methods that are validated scientifically can provide a new paradigm for low-cost medicine that can be disseminated worldwide to improve physical and mental health,” Delp says.

The research project is funded by the Stanford Catalyst for Collaborative Solutions, an initiative launched in 2016 to inspire campus-wide collaborations to tackle some of the world’s most urgent challenges.