Activity trackers add about 1113 daily steps for over-60s, then the boost fades

Regular physical activity is one of the most reliable levers older adults have for staying healthy and independent, yet getting more of it, and keeping it up, is famously difficult. Activity trackers and smartphone apps promise a cheap, scalable nudge: count your steps, see the number, walk more. Individual trials have tested this idea in people over 60 with mixed designs and mixed results, so the open question was whether the approach actually works when the evidence is pooled, how big the effect is in steps per day, and crucially whether any boost survives once the novelty and the study support wind down.

The researchers ran a systematic review with meta-analysis, searching six electronic databases including EMBASE and MEDLINE from their inception to January 2025. They included randomised controlled trials that used activity trackers or smartphone apps to promote physical activity in community-living people aged 60 or older, ending up with 29 trials and 3005 participants. The quality of each trial was assessed with the PEDro scale, results were pooled using random-effects models, and the certainty of the overall evidence was graded using the GRADE framework. The main outcome was physical activity measured as steps per day.

In the short term, at the data point closest to the end of the intervention, trackers and apps may increase physical activity by about 1113 steps per day compared with minimal intervention, based on 20 trials and rated as low-certainty evidence. Compared with other active interventions, the boost was 912 steps per day across 8 trials, though that comparison was rated very low certainty. The longer view was less encouraging: only single trials reported intermediate results at 6 months and long-term results at 12 and 24 months, and those suggested no sustained benefits once the intervention period was over.

This review pulls together a scattered trial literature and puts an honest number on what trackers and apps deliver for older adults: a real but modest short-term bump in daily steps, with low certainty attached. It complicates the popular assumption that a wearable builds a lasting habit, since the sparse long-term data pointed to no sustained effect. Key questions remain open: very few trials followed people beyond the intervention, so it is unclear what would make gains stick, and the comparison against other active approaches rests on only 8 trials of very low certainty.

If you or a parent over 60 are weighing up a tracker or step-counting app, this is a reason to expect it to help in the near term: on average roughly an extra thousand steps a day while the intervention runs. It is equally a reason not to expect the device to carry the habit on its own, because the limited longer-term evidence found the benefit faded. The honest reading is that the number on your wrist is a useful prompt rather than a permanent fix, and whatever keeps you walking after the novelty wears off will have to come from somewhere else.