A new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement finds median sauna session length and peak occupancy unchanged after a swipe-logged app timer replaced the gym's honesty-based flip-card, following a safety scare.
A fourteen-week occupancy-sensor study finds session length and peak occupancy unchanged after the flip-card gave way to a swipe-logged app timer
When Campus Recreation swapped the gym sauna’s honesty-based flip-timer card for a swipe-logged app timer this term, following a member’s report of losing track of time inside, the Adaptive Metrics Lab saw an opening in the changeover itself: fourteen weeks of occupancy-sensor data, split cleanly either side of the new panel’s install date.
The Lab’s new research poster, Swapped the Card, Not the Habit, compares 2,214 logged sauna sessions across the term. Median session length holds at fourteen minutes whichever timer is on the wall, and peak concurrent occupancy stays at six throughout. A four-week window in which both systems ran side by side shows the flip-card era’s own sign-out numbers tracking the swipe log closely.
The card told the truth the whole time. We just didn’t have a log that agreed with it until now.
— Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor, Impact Pathway Atlas
The result is being read around the School of Continuous Improvement as a small case study in its own instincts: assume the friction sits somewhere in the record, and go and look for it. “It says something about how comfortable we’ve become measuring things,” said Dr Joost Nwosu, the poster’s other author, “that the interesting result here is a non-result.”
The team compared session durations and concurrent headcounts drawn from the Lab’s occupancy sensor, sampled at one-minute intervals across the full term, against the flip-card era’s self-logged sign-out record.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.8qz26v.