Financial Incentives for Increasing Exercise

Summary

Participants will be employees of Genzyme who volunteer to participate in a study on motivating healthy behaviors, involving giving them goals for taking a certain number of steps per day, and increasing that number over time. Participants will wear pedometers and upload their data to a website that allows them to monitor their progress, and have the opportunity to win money based on meeting their step goals.

Interested employees will schedule a day and time to complete a health screening at a "Health Fair" at their place of employment, to ensure that they are healthy enough to participate; at this time participants will also complete the investigators baseline dependent measures, and receive a pedometer. After a one-week baseline period during which they wear the pedometer and the investigators establish their typical number of steps per day, eligible participants will then be assigned to one of four treatments - a "no incentive" control condition, and three conditions in which they are entered into different kinds of monetary lotteries if they have met their step goals for that day. Participants' initial goal will be based on their steps during the baseline period, and the goal will increase by 250 steps each week, for a total of 12 weeks. After these 3 months, the incentives portion of the experiment ends, but participants continue to wear their pedometers and upload their data for an additional 6 months. At 3 months, 6 months, and then at the study end at 9 months, participants again complete the investigators dependent measures at follow-up Health Fairs at their place of employment.

Conditions

• Sedentary Lifestyle
• Obesity

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Financial incentives for increasing physical exercise

Throughout the 12-week intervention, participants will receive step goals. The step goals will increase by 250 steps per week, The intervention will last a total of 12 weeks. After each seven-day week, step goals will increase by an additional 250 steps - thus over the 12 weeks, participants will be asked to increase their daily step count by 3,000. Participants will receive financial incentives to attain these step goals; the incentive schemes differ according to intervention arm.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Blue Cross Blue Shield

  collaborator OTHER

• Genzyme, a Sanofi Company

  collaborator INDUSTRY

• Partners HealthCare

  collaborator OTHER

• Harvard University

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Michael I. Norton, PhD · Harvard University

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

DOUBLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2010-01-31

Primary Completion

2013-04-30

Completion

2013-10-31

Countries

• United States

Study Locations