Qualcomm, the San Diego wireless technology giant, launched an internal “wireless fitness challenge” almost four weeks ago for a group of its employees—testing the idea of using similar workplace competitions to promote awareness of wireless health technologies.
When vice president Don Jones kicked off the challenge on July 14, he wrote in a Qualcomm blog that 32 employees were organized into four teams for the eight-week challenge to increase activity and lose weight. Contestants got an armband monitor from Pittsburgh, PA-based BodyMedia or an Internet-connected wireless weight scale from Withings of Issy-les-Moulineaux, France, (or both) to capture weight loss, calories burned, sleep, and overall activity levels.
“These devices wirelessly send our health data to the cloud, where we have built a platform that seamlessly ‘mashes up’ our information from both devices and leverages the BodyMedia analytics,” Jones writes in his blog. The results will be weighed, so to speak, to determine the winners, who also happen to be the biggest losers. (In an aside, Jones tells me by e-mail, “I doubt the Fortune 500 would get behind the ‘biggest loser’ branding.”)
While the challenge looks a lot like a publicity stunt, Matthew Holt of San Francisco-based Health 2.0 said during a mobile health and social networking conference in San Diego last week that there has been a big explosion in employer-based health, wellness, and fitness initiatives that rely on emerging mobile health and social networking technologies.
“We will also be posting follow up blogs, videos, check-ins with some of the team members, etc.,” Qualcomm spokesman Garrett Ponder told me recently by e-mail. Ponder, who also has been participating in the challenge, tweeted on July 29 that he burned 4,715 calories the previous day. On July 31, another participant tweeted: “Just 2 weeks & already over 1 Million calories burned by the 32 peeps in the Qualcomm Wireless Fitness Challenge!”
You get the idea.
Ponder also routed a few Xconomy questions to Don Jones, and provided these answers:
Xconomy: After two weeks, how would you describe the progress so far, both for the team and you personally?
Don Jones: So far, the progress has
