This past week we were invited to attend the mHealth Connect Conference sponsored by the Stanford Mobilize Center. During the conference we were excited to meet Karla Gleichauf, a Research Data Analyst at Fitbit. Karla was presenting some of her recent work exploring the impact and efficacy of the Reminders To Move (RTM) feature. For those of you not familiar with this feature, on certain Fitbit devices users are able to set a time window during which they can receive notifications to encourage obtaining a minimum of 250 steps every hour. If you haven't met your 250 steps goal for a given hour, your Fitbit will gently vibrate and display a message reminding you to get up and get those steps in.
Why remind you to move? It won't come as a surprise to those of you following the physical activity literature in the last decade, but sedentary behavior has become a particularly important behavior to understand, measure, and intervene on. Time spent in sedentary behaviors has been shown to be related to a variety of negative health consequences causing some to ask, "Is sitting the new smoking?" The number of interventions that researchers are testing in order to encourage more all day movement have been increasing over time as well. We were very interested to learn about Karla's work on understanding if Fitbit's RTM feature was having any impact.
Tell me a little bit more about the research. How did this all start?
Karla: Our development of reminders to move (RTM) was really a multi-disciplinary project of researchers, designers, and product managers. When we were first prototyping it we did some testing with friends and family and the results were really promising.
How did you evaluate it once it rolled out?
Karla: Once RTM officially launched in April of 2016, we gave everyone time to use it and get accustomed to it. After a few months we conducted an impact analysis comparing tens of thousands of Fitbit users' behavior before and after they had RTM. We used propensity score matching to do this analysis so we could compare RTM users to similar users who didn't have RTM and that helped us reduce some of the confounding we might see from other things like seasonal changes.
What did you find?
Karla: We found that the feature is working, and interestingly, some of the greatest effects were seen among the most sedentary people. Among people who got 250 steps in three or fewer work hours a day before getting RTM, 70% moved more after just two weeks. 60% kept their higher daily activity levels at the two-month mark. At the two-month mark, the previously sedentary users gained about 450 daily steps on average, which is an over 10x improvement over just the normal ebb and flow of activity over time.
How do you think this might be useful for researchers?
Karla: I think there is a really important lesson here about how to look at data. When you do something like launch a feature like RTM to your entire user base, you have to take a step back and look at your population versus looking at just everybody in the aggregate. RTM isn't for everyone, but once we identified who it was for, we were able to see really exciting results.
What are you excited about for the future?
Karla: I think what we're most excited about is becoming more personalized. We're really interested in using the data we have to provide better guidance and personal interventions for our users to help them reach their own health goals.
Thank you to Karla and the Fitbit research team for speaking with us about this exciting new research.
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