My phone number was temporarily stolen last month. Rather than just tweet about it, I decided to write a letter to my local MP, Jeremy Corbyn, with specific suggestions on how to combat identity theft and phone scams.
Dear Mr. Corbyn,
In the last month, I have been subject to multiple identity theft attempts and fraud scams. No permanent harm was done, but it was very distressing. Moreover, it highlights major shortcomings with the government’s regulation of personal data security, particularly for mobile phone companies.
On XX December, I received a text message from Three telling me that my registered billing address had been changed, even though I had not requested this. I was in Canada on holiday and unable to contact Three until I returned on XX January.
It emerged that someone had called Three on XX December pretending to be me (they only needed my billing address and date of birth) and successfully changed my billing address to “19 Haling Park Road, South Croydon, CR2 6NJ” — presumably a forwarding address. They then requested a replacement SIM card be sent there.
The SIM card would have arrived a few days later, giving them possession of my mobile phone number. They attempted to buy £650 of goods from Boots.com on my credit card. This attempt was stopped automatically, and when the scammers called the credit card compnay, they were unable to authorise the purchase because they didn’t know my PIN.
When I returned on XX January, I visited a Three shop and was given a new SIM card. I also changed my billing address back, and XX issued me a new credit card (with new number). Everything was back to normal — although on XXJanuary I received a call from a person with an Indian accent on 0333 338 1019, telling me that they were Three customer support; this was obviously untrue, so I hung up. Continue reading “Mr. Corbyn, Please Stop Phone Scammers”
After admiring the cutting-edge central heating, bathroom, and electrical wiring at Lauriston Castle in Edinburgh, our tour guide pointed out another neat gadget in Mrs. Reid’s bedroom: jockey scales.
Dating back to the late 19th century, these scales were designed to weigh jockeys before horse races, but Mrs. Reid’s scales were used to weigh visitors to the castle. They’d be weighed twice, in fact: firstly on arrival, and then on departure. Ideally, the visitor would have gained weight, demonstrating a healthy and nutritious stay.
Attitudes towards health and fitness were, of course, very different a century ago. While they were concerned about weight, this little ritual shows they were worried more about being underweight than overweight.
Of course, there is at least 25% chance this story is utter bullshit — it wouldn’t be the first time a tour guide told a tall tale. But what a cautionary tale it is!
Fitness trackers are the jockey scales of our time, a fashionable gadget that demonstrates your personal commitment to healthy living. And just like gaining weight, there is little evidence that using a Fitbit will actually make you healthier.
Now, it is true that you can be unhealthily thin, in which case it may be helpful to put on weight while you stay at your friend’s house (or castle). Likewise, you can be too sedentary, and so it may be helpful to wear a fitness tracker, assuming you actually use it properly, which most people don’t.
The point is not that I think fitness trackers are trash or that no-one should use them; rather, we should be aware that they represent a particular wave of fashion, one that is likely to dissipate in a few years in favour of an even more high-tech fad.
By all means, use a Fitbit if it works for you — but there are more important things you can do, like eating a little more vegetables and a little less meat, and doing more vigorous exercise that you find fun.
As for myself, I‘ve worn three step counters over the years. The first was a very uncool pedometer I wore for a few weeks to school in the 90s, and I don’t think it helped me at all.
The second was an early-model Fitbit, which I kept clipped to my belt. I was addicted to checking it throughout the day, and it did occasionally encourage me to walk a few hundred or thousand more steps. Whether that had any lasting impact on my health, I don’t know.
Today, I wear an Apple Watch. It is also addictive to see my ‘activity rings’ fill up during the day, and I find its use of calories to be marginally more scientific (as opposed to steps). Again, I don’t pretend that it is really doing anything to my health. I still walk exactly the same route to work, and I do the same 3–5 runs per week.
It does look cool, though, and isn’t that what really matters?
Is there any instrument that sounds more unpleasant in the hands of a beginner than the violin? Consider the piano. No matter where you hit the keys, you‘re guaranteed to be in tune, whereas if you’re off by just a millimetre on the violin, everyone will know. The guitar has frets that help delineate finger positions, while violins have nothing but a long, terrifying, featureless expanse. The cello? The strings are longer and the pitch is lower, so you have more room for error.
If it’s not your finger positioning, then it’s your bowing. And if it’s not your bowing, it’s too much — or too little — rosin. And so on.
Unless you’re unfortunate enough to have a child learning it, it‘s rare indeed to encounter the torturous sounds of a poorly-played violin. It’s for that reason alone, I think, that parents encourage their children to take up lessons. If they knew they‘d be exposed to hundreds of hours of frustrated, repetitive scratchings before hearing a hint of the heavenly tones that they hear on the radio or Spotify, they’d have bought a piano or guitar instead.
Yes, I learned the violin. How could you tell?
I do my best work when I solve my own problems. When I was at school, I spent a year in a ‘Young Enterprise’ scheme creating CD-ROM textbooks for biology, chemistry and physics exams because I found revising unbelievably boring (the company, of which I was Managing Director, instantly began in-fighting the moment a software publisher offered to buy the CDs).
More recently, Zombies, Run! — a fitness game for smartphones that makes running fun — was partly borne out of the months of pain and tedium that accompanied my learning how to run at university.
Learning the violin? That’s a special kind of pain, and it requires a special kind of solution. But it’d be worth it, because if you can make it through hundreds and thousands of hours of hard graft, you just might have a few moments of pure grace.
As with a lot of funny-but-mildly-offensive memes, High Expectations Asian Father has a kernel of truth to it. I saw a variation: “You can learn whatever musical instrument you want: Violin or Piano.”
I learned both.
I don’t know where these stereotypes come from, but the best origin story I’ve heard says that immigrants have always suffered from prejudice, and the Asian response was to pursue professions in which advancement depended purely on objective criteria. Becoming a journalist or an artist requires connections and is subject to people’s opinions, whereas becoming a doctor can be accomplished through aceing exams, whose results no-one can dispute.
The violin and piano, of course, both require a high degree of technical mastery, and they both are dominated by classical music — that is, music one can objectively decide whether it’s being played ‘properly’ or not, as opposed to all this modern pop or rap music, which changes so quickly it’s hard to trust your own opinions.
I was never a good violinist. After more than eight years of practice, I attained Grade 8 more out of sheer grit rather than natural aptitude; I may have produced a tolerable sound, but never one that was good.
Except for when I was playing in an orchestra. You might think that the only thing worse than hearing a beginner violinist is hearing twenty beginners play, but in truth, differences in pitch (“intonation,” my teacher would cry, “intonation!”) are evened out the more players you have. The tempo would still be all over the place, but even amateur orchestras could sound mostly OK with a bit of practice.
It was also much more fun to play in an orchestra. Unlike the terrifying, solitary experience of playing alone, you could lean on your desk-mate and the people in front of you (and, as a last resort, look at the conductor) to know when you were supposed to ‘come in’ after several bars of silence. It was really quite exciting, when you weren’t bored from repeating the same section a dozen times.
At most school and youth orchestras, you begin at the bottom of the second violins, then gradually advance up to the first desk position, and then graduate into the first violins; the second violins get all the dull harmonies that don’t sound like anything at all, whereas the first violins get the heroic melodies.
In my orchestra, no matter how terrible they sounded, violinists were typically promoted into the first violins in their last year, as a reward for their long service. As it happened, I was born early in the school year, meaning the conductors didn’t realise I was in my last year until too late, so I never played in the first violins. Instead, I spent a whole year as the leader of the second violins.
I don’t know that anyone enjoys being leader of the second violins, especially in a youth orchestra. You get the occasional heroic solo, but for the most part you’re looking after your younger charges — making sure they have their music ready, showing them when we’re supposed to come in with our harmony by exaggeratedly lifting your violin a couple of bars early, that sort of thing. It’s a responsibility without much reward, but someone’s got to do it, otherwise the orchestra stops working. For me, it was an instructive experience.
I also learned the piano for several years, but that was much more fun.
Perhaps learning the violin is not meant to be fun. Lots of things in life are not fun, but they are character building.
But this is absurd! It’s possible to take a skill that require thousands of hours of practice to fully master, and make it fun. It might take a lot of effort and time and entire new fields of technology like chess computers or virtual reality, but it is possible.
There are about 20 plug socket types being used around the world today, but only one really matters for modern devices: USB-A. And USB is truly a worldwide standard. Practically all the devices I might carry around – phone, tablet, watch, camera — can be powered directly via USB cable. My next laptop will be powered by USB. Even my Philips electric toothbrush can plug into a USB socket.
It’ll be several years until we can expect to see USB-A and USB-C sockets in the same places that we see plug sockets, which means I’ll still have to carry around charger bricks and plug adaptors when I travel abroad, but if you’ve flown on a plane or stayed in a modern(ish) hotel in the last couple of years, you’ll have spotted USB sockets.
This is a wonderful thing, the peace dividend of the smartphone wars. If I was staying in a hotel or friend’s house in practically any country, I could be sure of borrowing a charger cable or adaptor. Just think of all the waste and pointless peripherals avoided. Other dividends include the widespread usage of 4G/LTE and wifi standards, and soon enough we’ll be able to add wireless charging.
I’m curious to see if and when USB-C replaces USB-A as the socket type of choice. There’s a lot to like about USB-C in terms of reversibility (no getting the plug upside-down), increased power output, and size. But given the typical cycles of replacing infrastructure in hotels, airports, cars, planes, etc., I imagine it’ll be another decade before that really happens.
This week, I bought a new iPad Pro 9.7″ to replace my iPad Mini 2. I use my iPad at home for at least two hours every day, mostly for web browsing and reading magazines, so it didn’t feel like a stretch to spend the not-inconsiderable £619 to get an upgrade. I was particularly interested in the iPad Pro’s new screen (40% lower reflectance than the Air 2, maybe 70+% over the Mini 2; laminated display; etc.), the Apple Pencil support, and most importantly, a 3x speed increase compared to what I have now.
Has my Mini 2 gotten slower since I bought it two and a half years ago? It feels like it, but according to benchmarks, iOS 9 actually increased the speed of the Mini 2 for my most common activity, web browsing. Perhaps the benchmarks are wrong, but it’s also likely that I just expect much more from my devices every year – not just because web pages and apps are becoming more complex, but due to the ratcheting-up of performance on my other devices. When I first got my iPad Mini 2, I’m sure it made my iPhone 5 feel slow in comparison, but my iPhone 6 now makes the Mini 2 feel slow.
And now the iPad Pro makes my iPhone 6 feel slow(ish). That’s to be expected, but more surprisingly, in my tests it loads webpages just as fast as my 27″ iMac from late 2012, which has 24GB of RAM; the iPad Pro has ‘only’ 2GB. Last night I used FaceTime while browsing the web and scrolling in Twitter, and there was nary a hiccup. I’m sure I could make it slow down with, say, a dozen Safari tabs and Grand Theft Auto, but that’s not a common use-case for me.
The display is just as good. Yes, it has lower reflectance, which makes for a more pleasant reading experience (no getting distracted by subtle reflections in front of the text); yes, it can go brighter. But the real MVP is the True Tone feature, which basically white-balances the display by sensing the colour temperature of your surroundings. It’s not headline-grabbing but as soon as you turn it off, you realise just how blue the display would be without it. The ultimate effect is less eye strain because it makes the iPad feel more like a piece of paper rather than some artificial glowing rectangle. I wouldn’t be surprised if True Tone was introduced to all new Apple displays in the next couple of years.
Naturally, the world wouldn’t complete without Apple fanatics who are deeply, personally offended by the iPad Pro not having, say, USB 3 support or 4GB of RAM or a faster Touch ID sensor. Without them, it’s apparently not a sufficiently impressive upgrade over the iPad Air 2 from 18 months ago. I think that’s arguable, but what’s more interesting to me is that there are people who really want to upgrade a 1.5 year old tablet.
Now, we all know people who upgrade their phones every year, and while I don’t care enough to do that, I can understand the impulse because it still feels like there’s a rapid pace of improvements in smartphones. But I don’t know anyone who upgrades their computer every year. In fact, it wouldn’t even be possible to do such a thing on many Macs, because they don’t get updated that often – and in any case, the upgrades would get you a scant 10-20% speed increase.
Tablets occupy a middle ground. Since they share the same core processors as phones, they share the tremendous speed improvements. But their other features are changing less rapidly; people just don’t care as much about the camera or touch sensor on tablets as they do on their phones, because they use their tablets less frequently and for a narrower range of tasks. So I find it baffling that anyone would even want to upgrade their iPad every release.
I suppose people are upset because it’s called the iPad Pro and that Apple are marketing it as a replacement for your computer. If so, that’s unfortunate. ‘Pro’ is a marketing term; the iPad Pro is no more meant for ‘professionals’ than the Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro laptop is meant for professionals. The iPad will never be a true replacement for a traditional computer until it’s much more flexible and runs a windowed operating system… but… who cares? Many people don’t need a traditional computer any more, and most people are using traditional computers far less – I know I am. For the rest of the time, I’m happy using my tablet.
Stop the presses: storytelling has just entered the digital age! Every month, daring authors are creating new kinds of interactive experiences that push the boundary of what’s possible, featuring such innovations as ‘branching storylines’, ‘non-linear narratives’, and ‘illustrations’ – none of which would be possible in printed books. These authors are being aided by risk-taking, forward-thinking publishers, and together they are trailblazing paths into imaginative new territories.
You too can be part of this revolution! But it’s not enough just to write a good digital story – the true mark of success is not critical praise, popular acclaim, or financial success, but rather, it’s being covered in mass media.
That’s why I conducted an exhaustive survey of digital storytelling coverage on traditional media such as newspapers, trade publications, and general interest websites. By means of a proprietary deep learning algorithm I developed last night, I extracted the precise elements that will help – or hinder – your quest to get coverage, and assigned each one a point value. Naturally, nothing is guaranteed, but if your digital story ends up with a high point score, you can be confident you’ll be lauded by the likes of the New York Times and BBC.
Without further ado, the guide!:
+10 points if you’ve been engaged by a traditional publisher (bonus 20 points if it’s by a well-known one such as Penguin Random House or HarperCollins)
+10 if you’re an established novelist (bonus 20 if you hate apps and have never used a smartphone before)
+10 if it comes out at the same time as the traditional novel it was so clearly originally written as
-10 if your digital stories have sold more than 10,000 copies (-20 if they’ve sold more than 100,000; no-one likes that populist stuff)
-50 if anyone has ever called or compared it to ‘a game’
+20 if it’s episodic
+20 if its chapters can be read in any order
+20 if it has pretty illustrations that’ll look great in an article (bonus 20 if it has animations)
+20 if you hate Twitter, would never use it, and are prepared to write a piece saying so
+30 if you claim you have never played games or interactive fiction, yet are confident that your story is superior and more innovative
+5 if it does stupid-ass locational bullshit that means the journalist can get a day out of the office to try it out
+10 if the author is willing to say that “this kind of thing is just a bit of fun and will never replace real books”
-20 if it’s science fiction, fantasy, or romance
+10 if it’s based on Shakespeare, Dickens, or similarly out-of-copyright classic authors
+10 if it’s for kids (bonus 5 points if it’s ‘educational’)
+20 if your story involves Google, Facebook, Amazon, or Apple (bonus 10 points if it’s actually made by them)
+20 if your publisher has raised $1 million+ in VC
-20 if your publisher is profitable
-30 if your publisher has existed for more than 5 years
With thanks to Naomi Alderman, who provided essential help on the survey
Our office manager Sophie passed me the phone. “It’s someone from Google,” she said. I raised an eyebrow. Perhaps this was an invitation to an event, or another chance to test prototype hardware, or something even more magical.
I unmute the phone. “Hello?”
“Hi, I’m Tim, from Google Digital Development. I’d love to talk about how we can help you promote your apps on the Google Play Store better.”
How disappointing — they were just selling Google search ads. I quickly made my excuses and hung up.
Three months later: “Hi Adrian! My name is Mike, I’m from Google Digital Development -”
Seven months: “Hey Adrian! I’m from Google Digital -”
Twelve months: “I’m Sean, I’m from Google Digi -”
To this day, it keeps happening and I keep getting my hopes up, like a child. Why don’t I learn that ‘Google’ on the phone equals ‘Irish guy cold-calling with ad sales’?
Because I haven’t told you about the times Google contacts us about actual interesting projects. It’s usually by email, but sometimes they do call. Not on a regular schedule, of course — but at random, unpredictable times.
This pattern of frustration mixed with intermittent success is essentially a variable reinforcement schedule. If you’ve read any article about addiction in the last twenty years, you’ll know that a variable reinforcement schedule can be used to make rats compulsively press a lever in the hope of getting another pellet of food; and that the same schedule could explain how addictive behaviour develops in humans.
Some people in the tech community act as if variable reinforcement schedules were occult knowledge, magic words capable of enchanting muggles into loosening their wallets. If only we could learn the secrets of variable reinforcement schedules, we could make them addicted to our new app — all those microtransactions, all those ad views, oh my!
So when people learn that I studied experimental psychology and neuroscience at Cambridge and Oxford — and that I run a company that designs health and fitness games — they are taken aback. They are fascinated. And then… they are disappointed, but only after I tell them that the principles of variable reinforcement schedules and operant conditioning can be learned by a dedicated student in a few hours. Moreover, if experimental psychologists were all capable of making the next Candy Crush, they wouldn’t spend most of their time complaining about the quality of tea in the staff common room.
That doesn’t mean that variable reinforcement schedules are bunk, though.
Variable reinforcement schedules help explain why I spend an hour a day mindlessly checking Gmail, Metafilter, Reddit, Twitter, and Hacker News. Even when I know, with 99% certainty, that nothing interesting will have happened in the 15 minutes since I last checked them, I still type Command-R — because maybe this time I’ll get lucky.
More broadly, it’s why we pay attention to the constant interruptions that plague our screens — there’s no cost to the person sending the interruption, and occasionally, it’s of real interest to us. Continue reading “Invariable Reinforcement”
Back when I worked out at gyms, I’d often be found on the exercise bikes. Unlike the other cardio equipment, it was easy to grip the heart-rate monitors, and it was intriguing to see the numbers skip up and down as I went through my routine. But after a few sessions, I stopped bothering. The numbers always followed the same predictable pattern and I wasn’t learning anything new or useful from them.
I feel the same way with fitness devices and the notion of the ‘quantified self’ as a whole. Regularly recording your weight, steps, calories, heart rate, and so on, is useful when you are looking for changes, whether that’s because you’re trying to lose weight, run faster, or detect an illness. It’s good for professionals who are pinpointing exactly how to improve their performance. It’s good for long-term reviews of your weight or heart rate over many months or years. And it’s good for beginners who don’t know much about how their bodies will respond to change. But unless you fall into one of those categories, it’s not really that useful to know that your heart rate was, on average, 70 bpm this week and 68 bpm last week.
When I started running, I found it motivating to track my distance and pace with various gadgets. I stopped routinely recording my runs a few years ago when my habits settled down. These days, I run three or four times a week along two or three different trails, and I know exactly how long and difficult they are. It’s not that interesting for me to know exactly how fast I run because I can’t do anything with that data, and in any case, I can already tell.
There is a huge novelty factor for fitness trackers these days, precisely because everyone is now a beginner – even those people who were already running and walking. It really is interesting, for the first few months, to know how many steps you’re walking. But eventually it gets predictable and at least half the people stop using them altogether.
It’s refreshing that the Apple Watch dispenses with step counts as a primary measure, and to highlight three different numbers related to exercise, movement, and standing; and, by and large, to dispense with numbers as well. But I suspect even this simplified measure will get boring as well.
So if that’s the case for one of the Watch’s best features – fitness – what about the others? One week in, and I have a better idea of what the Watch is useful for.
Communication is, unsurprisingly, the killer app – just as it is for the iPhone. It really is much more convenient to receive texts on your wrist – and much less distracting. Often, when I receive a text or email on my phone, I’ll read it, and then I’ll mindlessly open up a whole bunch of other apps and end up wasting five minutes. With the Watch, I look at the text, and then that’s it. There is no temptation to fiddle with other apps because the screen is too small and frankly, it’s tiring to mess with it for more than 30 seconds.
Dictating texts with Siri is very good. But there’s one thing that’s even better – sending drawings to other Watch owners. In the two days that my partner and I have both owned Watches, we’ve sent a whole bunch of little drawings to each other. I am not a huge texting or emoji person but it’s a lot of fun to send drawings, and I’m surprised there’s been so little discussion about this. Perhaps it’s because so few people actually own Watches. Anyway – don’t let anyone tell you that these drawings are dumb or juvenile. They have hearts of stone.
The battery life continues to be perfectly fine. The more I think about it, the more irrelevant the complaints seem. The Watch can’t really function with the iPhone, which you have to charge daily. Now that we’re all accustomed to that ritual, adding another device on is not a huge burden. I usually end the day with 30-40% charge, which suggests that there is room for Apple to give users the option to keep the display on for longer, especially if they can improve power consumption in other areas.
Other quick observations:
The Uber app is no good for summoning cars since it’ll only use your precise location, rather than letting you change it to, say, the corner at the end of the street. But it is useful to keep track of a trip in process.
It’s fun to play around with the different watchfaces. I favour the ‘Color’ face, which I change to match my clothes.
I’ve uninstalled practically every third-party app. I think this is a major failure for Apple, and it’s going to take some persuading for me to reinstall them. What’s the point of having 3000 apps on launch day when they’re poorly designed and no-one wants to use them? Everyone loses out.
It’s annoyingly slow. Apps that display information from the internet (social apps, news apps, transport apps, maps; i.e. most of them) can take a few seconds to open, and then a few more seconds to display your desired data. I’ve already installed and deleted entire swathes of apps that suffer from this issue; the NY Times app, BBC News, Twitter, Twitterific, Foursquare, etc.
Compared against the very first iPhone, the Watch is very impressive in its capabilities and speed. Compared against the iPhone 6, it’s hard to justify using the watch at all for these apps. The good news is that any performance improvements Apple engineers can eke out of the hardware will have a knock-on positive effect on the entire watch experience – and I trust that they will have every motivation to succeed.
In contrast, apps that communicate solely with the phone (e.g. Music, Overcast, Calendar) or on the watch (Stopwatch, Timer) are reasonably responsive and useful.
Display
The screen is gorgeous, but small. It’s baffling and laughable that there are so many news apps on the watch. I suppose news junkies may find it entertaining to look at headlines, but the experience is so slow and poor compared to reading a screen of text on the iPhone that I expect few people will bother.
The screen size also makes it difficult to understand and use complex apps, like Maps, Citymapper or Transit. Apple and third-party developers are clearly trying to address this through tricks like Force Touch and by simplifying interfaces and use cases, but they need to do much more work to make the apps useful.
Fitness
The fitness tracking, on the other hand, is excellent. It counts my steps and distance accurately enough that my Fitbit is not long for this world. The built-in Activity app is also really quite well-designed and motivating, to the point that I fear for the future of third-party fitness tracker app developers. Consider the advantages that Apple has over them:
Apple’s fitness tracking app is pre-installed, both on the watch and on the iPhone.
It has access to private APIs and sensors; third-party apps can’t yet track heart rate, operate independently of the phone, or function in the background quite as well.
It can be added to watchfaces as a ‘complication’. That alone is enough to elevate it over any third-party app, and I doubt we will see that capability opened up within the next 2-3 years.
Day 1
I received the watch yesterday morning and proceeded to fiddle with it throughout the day. I initially blamed its slowness on our poor office internet, but it became clear later in the day that it was just slow, period. Tried a lot of third party apps, and deleted almost all of them.
Day 2
Went to the British Library to see the Magna Carta exhibition. Didn’t fiddle with the watch much at all, except to:
Play music and podcasts
Occasionally look at my step count
Let a kid play around with it (he’d been staring at it for ages, his mum was amused)
Battery was still at ~80% by 4pm – very respectable. Then went for a 1 hour run, tracking it as an ‘Outdoor Run’, which took the battery down to ~60%. The watch was initially very distracting and reminded me why I stopped wearing GPS watches – frankly, I don’t need to know my distance or calories in real time. Plus I only realised afterwards how to change the distance units to km (it’s by a force touch on the ‘start run’ screen, obviously).
When I run, I wear my iPhone on an armband so it’s really inconvenient to switch between music and podcasts, or to select specific tracks. The watch – despite its slowness and small screen – made doing those things perfectly easy, which was delightful. For me, that alone is practically worth the purchase price, given how frequently I run and how much I enjoy listening to podcasts and music.
I expect that other people won’t care about that stuff at all (maybe they only listen to a set music playlist, or they keep their phone in their pocket while running, or they don’t run at all) but perhaps there will be other things that they really appreciate. The ability to see the weather or read tweets on my watch isn’t a big deal to me if I have my phone in my pocket; but if you don’t have pockets, it’s a much bigger deal.
Many parents think their kids should be more physically active.
So why don’t we have more games that get kids moving?.
Combining kids’ love of games with their parents love of keeping their kids healthy seems like the perfect opportunity to do good and to make money — and yet we still don’t have ‘Fitbit for kids’. Is this like the proverbial dollar on the sidewalk that no-one’s picked up yet, or is there something more fundamental that stands in the way of kids’ fitness games and gadgets?
According to the CDC, obesity has more than doubled in children, and quadrupled in adolescents, over the past 30 years. Everyone from Michelle Obama to Jimmy Fallon is concerned about getting kids more physically active and eating more healthily. There are few out there who don’t realise this is a major challenge — and thankfully, there are some signs of improvement.
In the modern world of fast food, sugary drinks, and the lack of sports facilities in many areas, there are no easy solutions to improving kids’ fitness — but new ideas like fitness games might help reach kids who aren’t otherwise already engaged. In a perfect world, we could design fitness games that are as accessible and compelling and fun as playing on a smartphone or console.
These games might not be needed for kids who already play a lot of sports, but they could provide a valuable way to reach those who don’t. Kids who already enjoy playing sports don’t need this kind of encouragement, but all kids don’t have access to physical activities they enjoy. I didn’t enjoy our mandatory cross-country and rugby outings at school — but when I was allowed to play sports that I actually enjoyed, like football and badminton, I became fitter.
From Dance Dance Revolution to the Leapband, many people have already tried to tackle this problem. But why have so few succeeded in making a lasting impact?
mssv 