Computers and health: 'When you're sitting, you're one step above being dead'

Our digital lifestyles and desk-based workplaces are contributing to serious health problems and could be shortening our lives, technology’s wellness firms want us to believe.

“Americans will risk their lives for convenience,” Philo Northrup told the Consumer Electronics Show on Wednesday. Slouching over his chair and hanging his head down, he said: “When you say digital lifestyle, we’re talking about sitting, and over the day gravity is doing this to you.”

Northrup, president and co-founder of the connected exercise device TAO-Wellness, was in Las Vegas to promote TAO’s small portable device that encourages focused isometric exercises. He lifts and flexes the gadget, about the size of an apple, around his head, and says workplaces should start encouraging on-site exercise.

“Get the marketing department against the accounting department. Our thing is a game – as you press you’re moving a little avatar down the ski slope. You have a little dopamine and serotonin happening.”

Another panellist, Digital Trends managing editor Nick Mokey, concurs. “I hate to break it to you, a room full of people sitting down, but sitting is killing you,” he says to the audience. They shift in their seats.

A recent Harvard study found that for every dollar spent, a wellness program yields 2.17 cents for the company, Ann Scott-Plante of Weight Watchers explains.

“Yesterday I ordered lunch, they came to the curb, I walked five steps. It’s amazing and empowering but it’s making us even more sedentary,” Scotte-Plante said. “I used to have to get up and walk three blocks.”

While engineers have, perhaps characteristically, figured out fantastic products for sitting still – Munchery instead of walking to lunch, Uber instead of walking to the bus stop – services to make you move have been less compelling for consumers.

Fitbit’s stock price fell 18% after they announced their latest Apple Watch-like wristband on 5 January. Retention rates for the trackers are reportedly around 50%. And new data this year suggests that, for the first time, death rates for large segments of the American population are rising, with signs pointing to inactivity and weight gain as the culprits.

And so inevitably we come to the treadmill desk, a last-gasp effort to get people to move by promising they won’t even need to step away from their laptops.

I’ve never been on a treadmill desk, but the talk starts making me anxious, so I moved to one that’s set up in the back of the room. I reach for my coffee and almost fall off the machine. Someone asks if he can take video of me as I’m walking. What fresh hell is this?

“It’s not necessarily computers that are doing this to us, though even moving papers was more active,” says Pete Schenk, president of the treadmill firm LifeSpan Fitness.

He’s asked about the awkwardness of getting sweaty using a treadmill in the office; Schenk says the treadmill was just on too fast.

In the health section of the Sands Exposition Hall are myriad activity trackers, smart yoga mats and spandex-clad ladies on treadmills atop pedestals. Someone from a gadget company called iHeHa asks if I want to get a “two-minute body check”. People are selling breathalyzers and body-measuring gadgets, and then I arrive at a workplace fitness company called LifeSpan.

The treadmill desk guys are an earnest, athletic looking group from Salt Lake City. They say they’re the largest seller of treadmill desks in the US and that they’ve sold about 50,000 since 2012 to places like Google, Motorola and the White House.

They add they’re unfortunately stationed next to the other Salt Lake City-based treadmill desk company who are all about “sex” and “women in sports bras on treadmills” rather than LifeSpan, who aim at customers “in the second half of their lives” and the odd treadmill desk-embracing millennial.

At the center of their display area is a communal bike station, which looks like three gym bikes attached to a table. That’s for people who “just want to sit and enjoy conversation,” LifeSpan’s VP of sales Bobby Krause tells me, missing out the key ingredient of pedaling while doing all that sitting and talking.

Treadmill desk-related shame is their biggest obstacle, they say. When LifeSpan installs two in opposite ends of the same building, neither tends to get used. If the company installs two next to each other, people hop on. “You don’t like sticking out like a sore thumb, especially at work,” company spokesman James Lowe tells me.

He shows me their new 2016 model – the Rolls Royce of treadmill desks – which sells for about $2,500, pointing out the sleek faux-wood hood and privacy panel. “Modesty in movement,” he says. “People don’t like looking silly.”

Our gadgets aren’t killing us, but they’re letting us kill ourselves: “Tech enables an unfortunate amount of quiet. We’re paralyzed by our convenience,” he says.

Lowes looks at me seriously for a moment. There’s no anxiety quite like talking to a treadmill desk salesman. I know he can see the slope of my hunchback from years of computer labor.

“When you’re sitting, you’re one step above being dead.”