After getting over the loss of my beloved Fitbit and settling for a couple of free apps on my iPhone I was introduced to the Wechat app tonight by my Chinese friends. Wechat is a tools without which you can’t function socially in China. We have work groups, groups of friends, video calls, calls with family in the UK, all through Wechat so we all have it bleeping at us all day. But until this evening I hadn’t realised there was a kind of an app on it which measures and compares you activity with your friends.
It uses the health monitoring data your phone collects throughout the day on your movements. You then follow the link which allows you ‘follow’ the official Wechat account and then you get to see all your friends activity during the day and compare yourself with them.
I was pleasantly surprised to see myself immediately propelled to the top of the list, some 5,000 steps busier than any of my friends or students. And that’s just the steps when my phone was in my pocket. I don’t think it’s clever enough to know what I’m doing when I leave it on my desk! so I am quite pleased, if the thing is accurate, that I have done around 15,000 steps.
And being a very competitive person, I can now rank myself against others as I used to do with my Fitbit. Blimey, why on earth did I waste money on that piece of plastic?