Regular readers will know that I have been experimenting with the use of a fitness tracker for the last few months, and finding them quite useful.  I came across an article which looks at why they work, or rather what they need from us in order to work.  The thing is that of themselves, they do nothing but measure; what they are counting on is that we will do something with that data… like change!  There is an old saying in Change Management “You get what you measure”.

So here we have the intersection of two elements, change and technology.  In order to work, they look to help us change our life styles and get more active.  Professor Andrew Lane, a sports psychologist at the Centre for Health and Human Performance says that habits are, “A learned behaviour or thought that occurs automatically.” On a neuro-scientific level, “the pathway for habitual movement involves consistent messages, these messages are strong enough to stimulate action.”

The process of forming new habits is extremely complex, but Duhigg writes that generally there’s a three step loop when it comes to forming a habit, “A cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode; a routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional; and a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering.”  In other words, the more a synapse in the brain is used, the stronger and more automatically we can use it, so that we don’t have to think, we just react.  The manufacturers of these trackers are aware of this and support their hardware with software that encourages us to act.  They send encouraging little messages, give tips, make it easy for us to compete against our friends or ourselves.  It may seem silly… I guess it is only I find that it works and you can’t argue with that.