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Health wearables in combination with gamification enable interventions that have the potential to increase physical activity-a key determinant of health. However, the extant literature does not provide conclusive evidence on the benefits of gamification & there are persistent concerns that competition-based gamification approaches will only benefit those who are highly active at the expense of those who are sedentary. In this presentation, Zia Hydari will present his research, investigating gamification, health wearables, & healthy activity.
Using a unique dataset of Fitbit wearable users, some of whom participate in a leaderboard, we find that leaderboards lead to a370 (3.5%) step increase in the users' daily physical activity. However, we find that the benefits of leaderboards are highly heterogeneous. Surprisingly, we find that those who were highly active prior to adoption are hurt by leaderboards & walk630 fewer steps daily post-adoption (a 5% relative decrease). In contrast, those who were sedentary prior to adoption benefited substantially from leaderboards & walked an additional1,300 steps daily after adoption (a 15% relative increase). We find that these effects emerge because sedentary individuals benefit even when leaderboards are small & when they do not rank first on them. In contrast, highly active individuals are harmed by smaller leaderboards & only see the benefit when they rank highly on large leaderboards. We posit that this unexpected divergence in effects could be due to the underappreciated potential of non-competition dynamics (e.g., changes in expectations for exercise) to benefit sedentary users, but harm more active ones.
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