Most purchasers of wearable fitness monitors do so in the hopes they’ll be more motivated to exercise but this doesn’t necessarily pan out, a new study finds.

The market for these devices is booming, and an estimated 19 million of them are likely to be sold worldwide this year, statistics say. Many people buy them in hopes they’ll be motivated to exercise more, so researchers decided to put this assumption to the test.

They got together a group of 36 physical education students and gave each one a monitor, telling them it would measure the amount of sunlight they received each day. Later, they gave them another monitor to count the number of steps they took each day.  But the catch was that both monitors actually measured how active the physical education students were.

Although the researchers expected the students to set a brisk pace as roles models for good health, they weren't much more active than average, not-so-active citizens, even though they knew their steps were being counted. In fact, they took 11,000 to 12,000 steps a day, which wasn’t much above the minimum, and their activity didn't change with the monitoring, the researchers say.

"You need to take 10,000 steps a day to equal 30 minutes of light-to-moderate physical activity a day, and you should really do an hour a day to be healthy," says Ali Boolini, one of the lead researchers at Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y.
 “This shows you, don't rely on an exercise monitor as your motivation,” he added of the study’s finding, which will appear in PHEnex Journal.