In case you missed it, you can now earn up to $380 in vouchers from the Health Promotion Board (HPB), just by tracking your health on an app. LumiHealth, a collab between the Singapore government and Apple, doles out personalised health and wellness challenges and you’re rewarded for completing them. It has been available since Oct 28, and the programme will run for two years.

To take part, you’ll need to have an Apple Watch and an iPhone with iOS 13 or later — the challenge is tied to several Apple Watch apps. Only Singapore residents aged 17 and above with a SingPass account are eligible to take part. Just download the free LumiHealth app from the App store and you’re good to go.

What to know before you get started
LumiHealth is an in-app game where you’ll go on an intergalactic journey with a cute protagonist named Lu. For Lu to progress in his journey, you’ll need to fuel him up by earning points through a series of challenges.

As he moves along, he’ll reach certain milestones and you’ll be rewarded with coins when he does. Accumulate a certain number of coins in order to redeem them for HPB eVouchers that you can use IRL.

There are three types of challenges you’ll have to complete:
#1: Wellness challenges: These holistic challenges may be the easiest to do, but it takes discipline to complete them. They include taking time out for family and friends or learning to manage stress.
#2: Activity challenges: Every week, you’ll be challenged to close all three Activity rings (Move, Stand, Exercise) on your Apple Watch for a certain number of times per week.
#3: Personalised challenges: Personal recommendations and reminders for health screenings, articles to read, and surveys to do, among others.

Every 300 coins in the game gives you $1 in HPB eVouchers. You need at least 1,500 coins (or $5) before you can redeem eVouchers, and it's possible to earn up to $380 over two years. You can use the eVouchers at any of the partner merchants (there are currently 46 listed on the site), including Watson’s, Guardian, FairPrice, Giant, Koi, LiHo and Tangs.

We tried out the app for a week and earned, ahem, a grand total of $5.20 worth of e-vouchers (better than nothing, okay?). Not bad considering we hardly broke a sweat doing it.

In one week, we chalked up 1,560 coins (or the equivalent of $5.20 in vouchers). Admittedly, we probably could have fared better had we not neglected the app for a couple of days.

The good news? It was almost effortless to get to this point. The bad? It’s probably going to get harder from here.

The initial challenges for new users are easy peasy. We earned 450 coins just for joining and completing our profile.

Wellness challenges were also not difficult to complete. We had to complete a one-minute Breathe session on the Apple Watch app. For the first time in weeks, we found ourselves not dismissing the Breathe reminder, and actually taking time out for a few deep breaths, and ticked this off the checklist easily. Along the way, we completed another wellness challenge, and earned points for spending time with family and friends at least twice in a week. Not that difficult, right?

In terms of activity challenges, we had to complete a 15min outdoor walk at least once in eight days, easily monitored on the Apple Watch Workout app. We completed it when we took our dog out for his daily walk, but it could have easily been achieved with a (brisk) walk to the MRT station. For completing this task, we were awarded 100 LumiPoints, and an additional 2,500 as a bonus.

We also earned points on the activity challenge by closing all our rings on the Activity app — Move, Exercise and Stand — on at least one day in the week. There are also daily bonuses to score — close any ring for an additional 100 points. As for personalised challenges, we also chalked up points for completing a diabetes survey.

As we write this, we are in the midst of a wellness challenge to give up at least one distraction a day for four days this week — that is, spend less time on the phone, social media or TV, to devote more time to other things that we’ve been putting off.

We’ve completed it once (er, not Instagramming for one hour to pack our wardrobe counts, okay?), but to earn the 2,400 LumiPoints so that Lu gets closer to his next milestone, it will take us at least three more days (you can only manually check it off on the app once a day). Meanwhile, we’re 13,800 LumiPoints away from earning coins. Remember what we said about how it’s going to get harder from here?

Still, having earned a $5 eVoucher this easily thus far only spurred us on to press on with the challenge, which is probably what the makers had in mind.

LumiHealth is available for free at the App Store. More info at https://www.lumihealth.sg. The Apple Watch Series 6 (from $599) is available at Apple stores and https://www.apple.com/sg.