How Active Fantasy Sports Can Transform Couch Potatoes

TRANSCRIPT

This is a project that we call Active Fantasy Sports, and it is a game designed to help people exercise and be more physically active. And it’s built on the infrastructure of an existing sedentary game that is very popular called online fantasy sports.

So what are Active Fantasy Sports? Active Fantasy Sports are taking this popular game and instead of having people just focus on data that’s generated by professionals, allowing them to be monitoring their own physical activity data and have those data of the people who are playing in the fantasy sports league influence some of the privileges and outcomes in league itself. We accomplished this by giving people technology that helps them track their physical activity.

There’s sort of two goals for pursuing this patent and then as a next stage working potentially with industry partners in order to make this Active Fantasy Sports game available to more people. One of those goals is where the motivation behind it is to maximize the number of people who have an opportunity to benefit in terms of their health to be more physically active. Being able to reach as many people as possible make it available to people is really important.

A second important part of this is that the nature of doing research in behavioral medicine is such that a lot of the emerging research methods that are the most interesting to me require access to large data sets or big data. And so the kinds of research studies that we can do could potentially be predicated on partnering with industry in order to have instead of a few hundred participants each year or each month, having tens of thousands of participants coming in, opens the door for doing really exciting kinds of research.