Health insurers in Switzerland eye higher costs for the 'lazy'

CSS, one of Switzerland’s biggest health insurers, said on Saturday it had received a “very positive” response so far to its pilot project, launched in July, which is monitoring its customers’ daily movements.

The MyStep project, developed in conjunction with the University of St Gallen and the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, is using digital pedometers to track the number of steps taken by 2,000 volunteers until the end of the year, synchronizing that data with an online portal on the CSS website.

The project, the first of its kind in Europe by an insurer, “should reveal whether and how insurance companies can introduce an appropriate offer tailored to customers’ needs,” Volker Schmidt, head of technology at CSS, said in a statement.

The pilot also aims to discover to what extent insured people are willing to disclose their personal data, and whether self-monitoring encourages them to be more active in everyday life, pushing them to take 10,000 steps a day. Full story...

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