I would walk 500 more · 2009-07-23 22:04
It’s good to see pedometers become a bit more popular recently – they’re the vanguard of cheap, always-on personal informatics. Whilst I’d like to know if I’m a ‘morning lion’, and have worldwide high scores (as with Nintendo’s ‘Walk With Me’, craftily rebranded as Personal Trainer in the US), I’ve instead gone a different route.
Basically, if I walk, my health insurance cost goes down. PruHealth has a proactive approach, with a points system rewarding you for exercise, health monitoring, and general awareness of health and fitness. It’s quite complicated, but the bottom line is that if I walk 10,000 steps in a day, I save a quid off my health insurance next year, and for 12,500, two quid (midnight to midnight – Walk With Me is more human, measuring 4am-4am). On top of that, you get large discounts off gyms, and other benefits, as you earn more points.
It’s all recorded through an Omron pedometer, linked to fitbug.com via USB (PC/Bootcamp only, natch) through to the PruHealth website. Now, I walk a lot more than most people, but still I’m often around 8,000 steps (a day going to Kew, and out in the evening, reached 15,000 without trying). And whilst the monetary incentive isn’t that large for me, I’m often going out for extra walks to bump it over the 10k mark – the fact that I’m using the extra walking to explore the public houses of Clapham, Battersea and Wandsworth is by-the-by (soon to be replaced with the quicker method, running). Measure it, give it a number, and you want to beat it, increase it.
If you look at somewhere like the moneysavingexpert forums, you’ll find lots of people who have been encouraged to walk more by the scheme – whilst they argue about the technicalities of the points system, no-one really complains about doing the walking to save money.
This would all feel different if it was explained or used differently; if you were required to carry the pedometer by your health insurer or doctor- whether for general data, or for mandatory minimum exercise limits. This is the flipside of personal infomatics: if you measure something, companies you interact with will want to use that data. Would you carry a Nectar pedometer? A Nielsen GPS? We also need to be mindful of the quant/qual split; something being measured doesn’t tell the whole story.
comments
Of course, now I want to start competing with you. Maybe in September we should have a Steps challenge.