Influence of Pokémon Go on Physical Activity: Study and Implications

Abstract

Background: Physical activity helps people maintain a healthy weight and reduces the risk for several chronic diseases. Although this knowledge is widely recognized, adults and children in many countries around the world do not get recommended amounts of physical activity. Although many interventions are found to be ineffective at increasing physical activity or reaching inactive populations, there have been anecdotal reports of increased physical activity due to novel mobile games that embed game play in the physical world. The most recent and salient example of such a game is Pokémon Go, which has reportedly reached tens of millions of users in the United States and worldwide.

Objective: The objective of this study was to quantify the impact of Pokémon Go on physical activity.

Methods: We study the effect of Pokémon Go on physical activity through a combination of signals from large-scale corpora of wearable sensor data and search engine logs for 32,000 Microsoft Band users over a period of 3 months. Pokémon Go players are identified through search engine queries and physical activity is measured through accelerometers.

Results: We find that Pokémon Go leads to significant increases in physical activity over a period of 30 days, with particularly engaged users (ie, those making multiple search queries for details about game usage) increasing their activity by 1473 steps a day on average, a more than 25% increase compared with their prior activity level (P<.001). In the short time span of the study, we estimate that Pokémon Go has added a total of 144 billion steps to US physical activity. Furthermore, Pokémon Go has been able to increase physical activity across men and women of all ages, weight status, and prior activity levels showing this form of game leads to increases in physical activity with significant implications for public health. In particular, we find that Pokémon Go is able to reach low activity populations, whereas all 4 leading mobile health apps studied in this work largely draw from an already very active population.

Conclusions: Mobile apps combining game play with physical activity lead to substantial short-term activity increases and, in contrast to many existing interventions and mobile health apps, have the potential to reach activity-poor populations. Future studies are needed to investigate potential long-term effects of these applications.

Keywords: Pokémon Go; exergames; games; mHealth; mobile applications; mobile health; physical activity; public health; wearable devices.

Figure 1

Time series of daily steps for 2 sample users (a, b). Both cases show significant increases in daily steps after the first experiential query for Pokémon Go (t₀). Whereas before t₀ both users take less than 5000 steps a day, after t₀ they regularly reach around 15,000 steps a day.

Figure 2

Effect of Pokémon Go on physical activity. Plots show daily steps in absolute numbers for both Pokémon Go users (red) and control users (blue). Plot (a) shows effect for users with at least one experiential query. Plot (b) shows effect for users with at least ten experiential queries. In particular for the users who show significant interest in Pokémon Go (b), we observe large average increases of 1473 steps or 26% over the 30 days following on the first experiential query. Over the same time, the control group (same for both plots) decreased their activity by 50 daily steps on average. Error bars (shaded) in this and all following plots correspond to bootstrapped 95% CIs [23].

Figure 3

Effect sizes measuring the difference in average number of daily steps between the periods before and after t₀, for different user populations based on the minimum number of experiential queries; that is, toward the right the group of users becomes smaller and increasingly interested in Pokémon Go. At any level, there are significant differences between the effect for Pokémon Go users (red) and the control users (blue). The effect increases linearly with the number of Pokémon Go queries. This dose-response relationship between expressed interest in Pokémon Go and physical activity suggests that these users are in fact playing Pokémon Go and that playing the game makes them more active. CIs for the control group are too small to be visible.

Figure 4

Effect sizes of physical activity increase or decrease by user demographics, including prior physical activity level (top left), age (top right), body mass index (BMI; bottom left), and gender (bottom right). In all cases, we find that Pokémon Go users (red) exhibit larger changes than their respective control group (blue; see Methods). These results suggest that physical activity increases due to Pokémon Go are not restricted to particular subgroups of users but widely spread across the overall study population.

Figure 5

Comparing the effect of the Pokémon Go app with leading consumer health apps (A, B, C, and D). Pokémon Go users are less active than the average wearable user (control) before starting to play, but see larger increases in physical activity compared with the 4 consumer health apps.