Fitness tracker makers would have you believe that all that stands between you and the motivation to get up off your couch and get healthy is their shiny wearable device.
But a new study conducted by researchers in the UK suggests that, in some circumstances, fitness wearables can end up doing the opposite: becoming a demotivating factor, after the initial novelty of wearing a tracker wears off.
Their study focused on school pupils, aged 13 to 14, with participants split nearly equally between genders (44 girls and 40 boys), and recruited from two different schools in the north and south of the UK. The teenagers were asked to wear a Fitbit Charge wristband for eight weeks; to use the Fitbit app; and to take part in surveys and focus groups, before and after the trial period ended, responding to questions about how they felt about exercising and using the device.
The researchers had expected the wearable to have a positive impact on encouraging teens to exercise across a range of different forms of motivation, as well as hypothesizing it would help avoid kids feeling demotivated about physical activity.
Fitbit’s non-personalized 10,000 steps per day target, for example, was cited as an unfair and pressurizing goal by study participants — generating feelings of guilt or lack of ability among users, which in turn acted as a disincentive for taking more exercise.
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