Intelligent Health believe the most promising approach to tackling the public health crisis of alarmingly high population levels of inactivity is to support individuals to incorporate physical activity into their everyday lives. Dr William Bird started from this premise and developed Beat the Street to support children, adults and entire families to become physically active through walking and cycling. Beat the street uses gamification components to target the entire community and aims to increase levels of activity firstly via the school/work commute and secondly as a fun, family/community orientated social activity. This allows the intervention to tap into two important drivers, 1) a frequent pattern of travel behaviour, and 2) an emotionally connected activity.

In 2016, Intelligent Health delivered 18 community-wide interventions throughout the UK engaging over 300,000 people and discovered a statistically significant 15% increase in the proportion of people reporting active travel on 5 or more days per week. Beat the Street ran between 1st February and 22nd March 2017 throughout Milton Keynes. The programme engaged over 12,974 people who collectively walked, cycled or run 85,184 miles. Intelligent Health followed participations up six months after the intervention stage and discovered an 8% increase in the proportion of people walking on 5 or more days per week, a 8% decrease to just 2% of people reporting no active travel and a 17% increase in the proportion of people starting to cycle on 1 to 3 days per week. All changes were statistically significant. These findings provide evidence that gamification may be a promising approach to creating long-term changes in the travel behaviours of whole communities.