One More Reason to Get Off the Sofa and Shake It

There are a variety of games for Xbox Kinect that encourage players to get off the sofa and shake their booty, but did you ever wonder how many calories you actually burn doing that?

Now there’s a new dashboard for Xbox Live to track the action and monitor the burn: Kinect PlayFit. It’s a free download from the Xbox Live Marketplace that lets you look at daily, weekly, monthly and cumulative totals of calories burned playing Kinect-based games — and if you dare, compare your scores with friends and the Xbox Live community. You can even earn Xbox achievements and avatar awards.

As executive producer Chuck Frizelle points out in this article on Microsoft News Center, the dashboard gets to the heart of what any coach, trainer or PE teacher will tell you is the key to fitness: motivation.

 

“Ultimately, Kinect PlayFit is a motivational tool. We want to motivate people to change their behavior and be more active.”

 

PlayFit works with a dozen titles, and Frizell says plans are in the works to add more soon.