The opinions stated here are my own, not those of my company.
Sometime in summer 2020, as San Francisco Bay Area’s shelter-in-place orders continued and raging wildfires throughout the state made outdoor air quality levels hazardous, I checked my fitness tracking app for the first time in over six months. I was presented with a series of embarrassingly tiny circles – the app’s way of visualizing the dismally low number of steps I was taking each day.
On one day, I had taken only 346 steps! To put that into perspective, the American Heart Association recommends 10,000 steps/day, and a recent study showed that taking just 8,000 steps/day can reduce mortality risk by over 50%.
I felt disappointed in myself: how had I let this happen? Why hadn’t I checked my steps sooner? In retrospect, the answer here is pretty clear: the pandemic happened, and we were all focused on adjusting to new ways of living, working, and relating. Indeed, one peer-reviewed study showed daily steps declined an average of 27% worldwide in the month following Covid-19’s official declaration as a pandemic.
Nevertheless, at this Moment of Steps Epiphany, I needed to understand: how did these numbers compare to how much I was moving before? How long had my movement been on the decline? Many fitness tracker apps are great for viewing activity within a week or a month, but don’t really support comparing long-term trends. So I downloaded my data and graphed it myself, applying a 30D rolling average to better visualize longer-term trends.
[Caption: a subset of my 30D rolling average daily steps by date]
You can see the sudden drop after I started working from home on March 3, eventually petering out to my lowest 30D average count of 1876 steps, an 82% drop from my all-time average high. My overall time spent walking (non-sedentary time, not pictured in the chart above) also plunged, from spending on average 1 hour and 45 minutes walking daily to just 13 minutes.
To be clear, I had known in general terms that I was moving less. No more walking as part of my daily commute, or between my desk and meeting rooms in the office. No more walks to the gym, or meeting friends for in-person dinner and drinks. No more exploring – on foot – the new places that I visited for work. I only stepped between the rooms in my ~700 square feet apartment and on a daily post-work walk with my housemates to a nearby park. But even with this vague sense of the loss of movement, I’d never have guessed I had become so much less active.
I was super motivated to get my activity levels up again, to around 10k steps/day. I changed up a few things:
- Increased my awareness of daily movement by adding a step tracking widget to my phone’s home screen. Every time I unlocked my phone (which for me bounces between 60-100 times every day), my daily steps and miles covered were front and center. It’s easy for me to know throughout the day if I need more activity.
- Made walking safe and convenient at any time of day by investing in a walking treadmill. Especially with shorter daylight hours in winter, this has been a game changer. I’m able to take walking meetings with video on and without street noise, and even read and watch TV while walking.
- Stopped thinking of my time spent walking as a strict tradeoff with time spent working, socializing, or having fun. I started converting as many work meetings to walking meetings as possible; perfect candidates included less formal 1:1s and meetings where I’m mostly listening. I also scheduled a bunch of masked, socially-distanced walks, or catch-up walking video calls, with friends.
Here’s the result:
Surprisingly, my overall time spent walking actually surpassed my previous averages, going from 1 hour and 45 minutes to almost 2.5 hours each day. This is because my walking treadmill steps are generally at a slower pace, since I’m usually multitasking. You can see the spike in my average walking duration (in minutes):
So my serendipitous checking of my steps, plus my own data crunching, helped me realize my inactivity and become reasonably active again. But I wish that fitness tracking apps, in general, could do more to proactively flag long-term health trends.
Fitness trackers today (such as Apple’s Health app, the Samsung Health app, Oura’s app, and more) mostly support explicit, short-term goals for users who are already actively invested in their own health. That’s the group of people who’d say “I want to walk 10,000 steps a day.” At the micro-level, fitness trackers support these users by reminding them to move every hour, of progress against daily and weekly goals, and the like.
Some also analyze longer-term trends (over months or years). For example, Apple’s Health app has some pretty direct insights, such as comparing average steps/day this year versus last year:
And the Oura ring’s new “Oura on the web” dashboard has perhaps the most in-depth trends analysis I’ve seen so far. At the daily, weekly, and monthly levels, it calculates a staggering thirty-one different metrics and the strength of correlation r between any two of them:
However, insights like these are only available in-app, so users who don’t have explicit goals – and who are then unlikely to be active app users or buy wearables like the Oura – probably won’t see them.
But even people without explicit, short-term fitness goals usually have a longer-term, implicit goal in mind: to not get a lot less fit. After all, most people would want to know if their gradual habit changes resulted in a much higher mortality rate. So, there’s a missed opportunity to understand a user’s long-term baseline and proactively flag deviations from it. You could imagine a threshold, like “median monthly step count is 25% down from the user’s lifetime median”, triggering an email notification (opted-in, of course).
This is a different kind of value proposition that positions fitness trackers as a proactive alarm system, rather than a reactive data repository that users must remember and intentionally re-engage with. By pushing insights, fitness tracking apps can reach a new set of users: people who aren’t committed enough to regularly open their fitness apps or try for daily step goals, but who would care to know that they’re moving less (say, 82% less) than several months ago. And for users with both implicit and explicit goals, this is a value proposition that aligns with the realities of health and habit changes – that they can occur gradually and unnoticed over longer periods of time.
I’m incredibly grateful that I was able to use my tracked data to identify and correct my own increase in sedentary time. But I shouldn’t have had to randomly check my app and create my own graph to gain the insight that I’d dropped from 100+ to 13 minutes of daily walking. The fitness tracking apps with which we entrust our long-term data have the obligation to offer longer-term insights. I hope they’ll start doing so, and bring a value proposition of proactive alerts about long-term trends, to fitness tracking at large.