More and more people live, commute and work in the city. But how do we keep cities good to live in and healthy? These are challenges many big cities are dealing with. The success of Niantic’s Pokémon GO shows the many possibilities mobile games offer to reach a big audience and ‘play’ with the way you use a city.

Together with a European consortium, Healthy Urban Living researcher Monique Simons of Utrecht University received 350,000 euro from the Erasmus+ programme for the big international research consortium PREHealth. They do research into how digital applications ­–apps and mobile games– can be deployed to encourage people in the city to use the public space more often for physical exercise. Besides the Netherlands, the consortium also consists of Germany, Greece and Hungary.

The deployment of mobile games for a healthy urban life is one of the research lines of the interdisciplinary research group Healthy Urban Living (HUL) of Utrecht University, which includes Simons.