I'm in support of your project, and see the great participation you get. But I am conflicted about the details.
I'm in SE Asia now and the condo I live in has a circular drive about 2 km total. People run and walk that route daily and I hear their cell phones saying things like. "You are going ## km per hour. Time elapsed ## minutes, distance covered ## km." People love this type of thing, so I think you are on the right track.
On a personal level, I have rheumatoid arthritis and do not walk much. I swim, stretch, and do strength moves for my exercise. They year I lost "half my size" I stopped all the walking I had been doing in the previous few years. I was up to 2.5 hour walks and it was not helping me get fit, or lose weight. Instead, I was in a lot of pain and thought it was my fault.
On a professional level, I coach morbidly obese people to help them lose weight, and don't recommend they aim for 10K in steps as a daily goal. I'm often dealing with people over 50 bmi and walking incessantly is a bad plan until they have less weight to stress their joints in my opinion. People I work with cannot do the activities of daily living at all such as getting up and down from a seated position.
I would love to know your opinion about that since you have much better participation than I do.
I don't have any of those devises or know anything about them, and I am not sure about the health effects of wearing them on your body 24/7.
Thank you for sharing all this wonderful info, and we love the help you are giving to all those people with morbid obesity, well done!
We cannot give any real medical advise, if that is what you're asking us for. We are simply incentivizing people to be active and move more often, as that is the general recommendation for normal individuals who do not suffer anything that prevents them from doing so.
In terms of wearables, we also have no info on whether any studies have been done on them in terms of health effects, yet if you find them beneficial, and you could be interested in owning one (a Fitbit for example, which we currently support), you might simply get tracked activity and earn rewards for doing that.
Feel free to join our discord and chat with us further well, and please keep doing the amazing things you already are doing! It simply makes us happy and proud!
Finland and a few other countries in Europe currently recognize cell phone brain cancer as a disease and cover it with insurance. But that is about the extent of what I know.
A big part of my coaching it to get people off the idea of tracking in the sense of how you do it. By the time people get to me, they have chronic diseases and can't lift their arms over their head etc.
I completely agree that "normal" healthy people are a different category and that tracking can and does work for them.
I don't see myself ever getting a fitbit or anything like it. What do you use your discord group for?