Well, this might come as a surprise (probably not) but researchers carried out a study with 167 Pokemon Go players and revealed that it’s a great practice for your health. This research, presented to the American Heart Association, suggested that the widely popular AR game may help increase a player’s daily step count. It could highly benefit young adults with a sedentary lifestyle or those who’re obese or overweight, it further adds.
There is no doubting the fact that nostalgia-ridden mobile game, Pokemon Go, has gotten numerous lazy bums to get off their couches and stroll around your neighborhood catching the pocket monsters. But, who would’ve known that the gaming phenomenon is having such positive effects on our physical self.
Commenting on the research, Hanzhang Xu, a graduate student at Duke University School of Nursing in Durham, North Carolina said,
We wanted to determine if Pokémon Go can provide an enjoyable way to engage people in regular physical activity. Our findings suggest that active-play games, such as Pokémon Go, may encourage people who live sedentary lifestyles, who otherwise may not participate in traditional forms of exercise, to increase their physical activity.
The study, as aforementioned, was carried with a cohort of 167 Pokemon Go players between June 15 and July 31, 2016. Each of these players was asked to report their daily step count using the iPhone Health app. And the study found that the players walked an average of ~2,000 additional steps when playing the game every day. And this increase was as high as ~3,000 steps for players whose activity levels were the lowest.
Further, players enjoying active-play games or using different kind of apps like showbox apk, mini militia god mod to enjoy extra features, and other such apps to entertain themselves were twice more likely to reach the 10,000 daily step milestone. Their step count had also increased from an average of 5,678 steps to over 7,654 in the period of the study. This increase could lower the risk of having a heart attack or stroke by 8 percent in high-risk players, says the report. Thus, Ms. Xu adds that such forms of small physical activities would also greatly benefit obese and overweight individuals, especially in the United States.
Additionally, these steps could also help parents in tracking the overall activity of their child. By using IP Geolocation tools, parents could see where there kids exactly are, so that the worry of younger kids going out could substantially reduce.
So, what are you waiting for, go enjoy a healthy lifestyle by catching ’em all. Niantic Labs has just recently added 80 second-generation Pokemons to the game. It has also updated the tracker system, added new berries and other perks to capture the flailing interest of the players.
