MIT students explore user motivation in effort to make workouts 'addictive'
The search for a way to make cardiovascular exercise less monotonous, and more entertaining, continues: this time at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge.
Equipment manufacturers have experimented with a variety of solutions with varying degrees of success. Preprogrammed and customized courses, workout feedback, Walkmen, flat-screen TVs, Internet access, and interactive games—all have been tried, and have, in fact, helped make the arduous more appealing, but three students at Sloan have set their sets higher. The trio—Harris Rabin, Doron Harley, and Joseph Heitzeberg, all big fans of electronic gaming—want to make exercise so much fun that it's virtually addictive.
'The idea is to create a system so interesting and enjoyable that people will forget they’re sweating,' the Boston Globe noted recently.
'Isn’t it funny that aerobic exercise on a machine is incredibly boring,' observed Heitzeberg, 'yet you can play basketball for 45 minutes, and it's fun . . . It's about the brain—not the body.'
The group have attempted to solve the problem not just by connecting a stationary bike to yet another interactive game, but also by understanding, and addressing, human motivation better. Armed with a $30,000 grant from Microsoft Corp., and a recumbent cycle donated by Precor, they've developed CycleScore, a system that transforms the bike's pedals and handlebars into game controllers. By pumping slower or faster and steering skillfully, users score points as they navigate a challenging virtual world.
But the real improvements have to do with the underlying rationale. 'We designed a set of experiments in which we could test different aspects of ideas about motivation,' explained Dan Ariely, a professor at Sloan and MIT’s famed Media Lab who assisted with the project. Among other things, the students discovered that people exercise more if they count backward rather than forward (so the CycleScore's timer runs backward), and that they'll exercise more aggressively if the pain involved decreases over time (so pedaling becomes easier at the end).
