Study shows that Pokemon Go game can make you fitter

A new study has found that playing Pokemon Go can increase a player's daily number of steps.

According to researchers, the novelty of increased activity dropped off six weeks after the launch of the game.

Animated Pokemon monsters first became popular in the 1990s. Pokemon has been featured in computer games, films, television programmes, and then in smartphone game as Pokemon Go.

The smartphone game launch in July 2016 and has been downloaded more than 500 million times since then, is an amplified reality game in which players search real world locations for cartoon characters appearing on their smartphone screen.

The researchers from US examined 1182 study participants between the ages of 18 to 35 and the daily number of steps undertaken by players before and after they installed the game on their smart phones.

Four weeks before the game app was launched, participants walked an average of 4256 steps each day, with almost half the study group going on to play Pokemon Go.

In the first week after installing the game, players increased their average daily steps by 955 extra steps, but the following weeks saw a steady decrease and the effect was lost six weeks after playing the game.