NCT03109509

Testing the Efficacy of Pokemon Go for Increasing Physical Activity

Pokémon Go Modestly Increases Time Spent Active Among Healthy Adults

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 100 (actual)
• Sponsor: University of Iowa · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 80 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

Historically, increasing activity was synonymous with exercise; however, it is now thought that even much more modest activity levels (e.g., simply walking) or merely decreasing the proportion of sedentary time may be sufficient to decrease future morbidity and mortality. Some interventions designed to increase activity have shown promise; others have been less successful. But even promising interventions are often difficult to generalize to real-life clinical settings. One barrier to monitoring the effectiveness of interventions has been the lack of availability of accurate, reliable and inexpensive personal activity monitoring equipment. The availability of inexpensive pedometers, and, more recently, low cost triaxial accelerometers, has now made it much easier to monitor activity levels and provide feedback to users. These devices are ideal for capturing activity associated with walking, the most popular and acceptable form of exercise, but only if patients actually wear them. Thus, there is a need to develop pragmatic approaches that encourage patients to not only wear these monitoring devices, but also motivate them to increase their activity. In recent years, games have been used in a variety of settings to motivate and change behavior. Games not only provide performance feedback to patients, but also provide incentives for achieving goals in a context that is fun, intrinsically rewarding, and easy to understand. Successful games effectively exploit motivating social factors (e.g., competition, peer support, and entertainment) to maintain interest and engage participants. Steps are counted using a commercially available triaxial accelerometer (e.g., a FitBit). Pokemon Go is an augmented reality game that encourages players to go outside to search for Pokemon creatures.

Conditions

• Sedentary Lifestyle

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Fitbit + Pokemon Go	Participants received a Fitbit Zip to wear daily for 8 weeks. Participants also received access to the Pokemon Go game.
BEHAVIORAL	Fitbit Only	Participants received a Fitbit Zip to wear daily for 8 weeks.

Timeline

• Start date: 2016-07-20
• Primary completion: 2016-10-30
• Completion: 2017-04-01
• First posted: 2017-04-12
• Last updated: 2017-04-28