National Steps Challenge

The Health Promotion Board here in Singapore, came up with a novel idea of making people walk everyday by launching a National Steps Challenge program.

The program is simple. You sign-up for the challenge. HPB gives you a steps tracker that you wear everyday and it counts your steps. HPB then gives you points (15 points for completing 5000 steps, 30 more for 7500 and 15 more for hitting 10,000 adding upto a max of 60 points a day). The points are then monetized and you are entitled to get a reward/ voucher/ or some other benefit when you hit pre-defined point levels.

The key is - consistency. 60 points is the max you can earn in a day by meeting your daily quota of 10,000 steps. The challenge doesn't care if you do 40,000 steps in a day. As long as you meet your goal of 10,000 steps for the day, you are not rewarded any more points. It's impressive that they do not reward spikes or one-off exercisers. They are training people to be consistent in working out and are incentivizing that habit.

This will probably turn out to be the best ever government led, incentive driven public exercise program ever conducted.