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Playing Pokémon Go may actually be good for your health
August 15, 2025
Pokémon Gohas been out for almost a year, and while it is not quite as popular as it once was, there are still plenty of players out there who are walking around their city or town looking to catch new creatures with the AR-based mobile game. Now a medical paper that was recently published the Journal of the American Heart Association seems to show that playing Pokémon Go may be good for your overall health.
The paper says that its team recruited 167 Pokémon Go players who were asked to send screenshots of their step counts as recorded on their phones. This happened between June 15 and Jul 07, 2025, which also happened to be 3 weeks before and 3 weeks after the launch of the game. The average age of the people who took part in the study was 25 years old.
Before the game launched, the average daily amount of steps recorded by those players was 5,678. However, at the end of the recording period, three weeks after the game began, the average step count went up to 7,654. The obvious conclusion is that playing Pokémon Go does indeed cause an overall increase in a person’s physical activity (PA). It added, “IncorporatingPAinto gameplay may provide an alternative way to promotePAin persons who are attracted to the game.”
Even though Pokémon Go may have lost a large number of its initial player base, there are rumors that developer Niantic Labs will be launchinga major update to the game this summer. The update may finally add multiplayer player-vs-player modes to the game, among other additions. In that case, we could see another boost in PA as well.
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