MoveBot: Battling inactivity one micro-exercise at a time

Many of our NVISO colleagues are very active during their free time. We have colleagues who go mountain-biking, rock climbing, swimming, running, … The problem is that during the day, they often sit at their desk for four hours straight, grab some lunch, and go back to their desk to sit and work at their computers. To make everyone just a little bit more active during the day, we created MoveBot.

MoveBot is a Slack bot that posts messages to our Slack channel twice a day. For example, just this morning, I got the following notification:

After having done the exercise, I clicked the “I did it” button, and MoveBot congratulated me:

Of course, a concept like this doesn’t work without some gamification, so every time someone completes an exercise, they get some points. At the end of the month, we give out a little prize to the most active members. You may think that this encourages cheating, but that’s why we had everyone sign a mock contract where they promise to try to live healthy and never ever ever lie to MoveBot ;).

We also use our MoveBot to do some team-building. For example, our set of “exercises” also includes “go get lunch for a colleague” or “during lunch, take a walk around the block with a colleague”.

Sharing is caring, so we’ve pushed the basic code behind our MoveBot to GitHub. Keep in mind that this was a quick project (and my first ever Flask/SQLAlchemy application) so the code isn’t that great, but it does what it’s supposed to do :).