Another from the annals of unnecessary and possibly harmful research on motivation. Unsurprisingly, fitness trackers do nothing for motivation and, even less surprisingly, if you offer a reward then people do exercise more, but are significantly less active when the reward is taken away...

"...at the end of twelve months, six months after the incentives were removed, this group showed poorer step outcomes than the tracker only group, suggesting that removing the incentives may have demotivated these individuals and caused them to do worse than had the incentives never been offered."

This effect has been demonstrate countless times. Giving rewards infallibly kills intrinsic motivation. When will we ever learn?

One interesting take-away is that (whether or not the subjects took more steps) there were no noticeable improvements in health outcomes across the entire experimental group. Perhaps this is because 6 months is not long enough to register the minor improvements involved, or maybe the instrument for measuring improved outcomes was too coarse. More likely, and as I have previously observed, subjects probably did things to increase their step count at the expense of other healthy activities like cycling etc.