Of its Website, Titelmedia strives to ensure that its Website services and content are accessible Titelmedia (Highsnobiety), is committed to facilitating and improving the accessibility and usability The survey, which sampled 2,000 men and women ages 18-34, found that people who were already healthy found health and fitness apps useful, while the same percentage of people who weren’t going to the gym and being healthy found those apps to be useless. But even then, it suggests that there’s a bigger problem with the market, not the practicality of fitness apps themselves.Īdditional research from a team at Carnegie Mellon University is a little less optimistic. So the research there basically says that fitness apps have the potential to help people, but because they’re often made by amateurs and sold on a market that’s mostly unregulated and motivated by download rates, it doesn’t bode well for those apps’ actual effectiveness. “Our results suggest that developers have not incorporated many behavior-change techniques to date, and there may be opportunities to integrate behavioral science to make apps that are more effective for helping people who seek to change their behavior and become more active.” Lo and behold, the study showed that the group who did not use the improved version of the app experienced no changes in their daily routine, while the test subjects who did, exercised more. When features include things like training goals, specialized diets or contact with “real live trainers,” people are more motivated to work out more consistently.įor the study, Mary Jung, an assistant professor at UBC Okanagan’s School of Health and Exercise Sciences, teamed up with an unnamed fitness app company to implement a couple features like goal setting, personalized feedback and other key elements of health behavior change to their app’s users, and then monitored exercise levels in app users and non-app users. Other research suggests that fitness apps definitely work, but are especially effective when they’re personalized to the user.

“Our main finding was that people who have a lot of barriers appear to obtain higher levels of self-efficacy when they use exercise apps.” “Exercise apps can be a vehicle for behavior change in exercise in the same way that a nicotine patch can be a vehicle for behavior change in smoking,” Litman says in the interview.

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