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 de-motivating factor, after the initial novelty of wearing a tracker wears off.
Researchers at Brunel University London the University of Birmingham conducted an eight-week study to investigate whether fitness wearables could encourage young teenagers to take more exercise.
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.
However, while the researchers record an initial “novelty” bump in interest in physical activity among some participants “for the first few weeks”, the results of the full study were the opposite of encouraging — with participants overall reporting feeling less confident about their competence at exercising, and ultimately discouraged from doing so.
“It was consistently reported that after about 4 weeks pupils became bored with the Fitbit,” the researchers write. “This evidence suggests that though the...