Motivating physical activity at work

Abstract

Previous research has suggested that social and competitive interaction over online social networking sites could be harnessed in order to motivate behaviour change in users. This paper presents the design and in-the-wild evaluation of StepMatron, a Facebook application designed to provide social and competitive context for daily pedometer readings in order to motivate physical activity in the working environment. A study was conducted in order to determine whether interactions between users via the application more successfully motivated physical activity than simply recording daily step counts in a similar application. Ten participants (1 male), all nurses working in a UK hospital, used the application across two conditions over the course of the study. In the socially-enabled condition, participants could view each other"s step data and make comparisons and comments. In the non-social condition, participants could only view their own personal step data. A significant increase in step activity was observed in the socially enabled condition. Our findings highlight the potential of social media as a means for generating positive behaviour change. They also suggest that simple mobile devices can function as an inexpensive, accessible and powerful trigger towards this behaviour change without necessitating the use of overly complex and expensive mobile applications or devices.

Are Health Behavior Change Interventions That Use Online Social Networks Effective? A Systematic Review

“…Three key study types were identified: (1) large-scale evaluations of “live” interventions, typically with >1000 participants (four studies with sample sizes ranging from 545 to 107,907) [22,24-26], (2) medium-scale, tightly-controlled randomized controlled trials, typically with approximately 100 participants (four studies with sample sizes ranging from 52 to 134) [27-29,31], and (3) small pilot studies, each with 10 participants (two studies) [23,30]. In all, five studies were randomized controlled trials (RCT) [22,27-29,31], one was a randomized cross-over study [23], and four were single group pre-post studies [24-26,30].…”

“…In all, five studies were randomized controlled trials (RCT) [22,27-29,31], one was a randomized cross-over study [23], and four were single group pre-post studies [24-26,30]. Of the six studies that utilized a separate control group or arm (crossover study), only one had a “true” (ie, no-intervention) control [29], with the others comparing the online social networking intervention with an alternative intervention (in five cases the alternative intervention was Web-based [22,23,27,28,31], and in three cases the alternative intervention involved an online social networking component [22,23,27]. …”

“…Interventions ranged from 5 days [23] to 6 months in duration [28]. No studies reported follow-up of outcomes and maintenance of behavior change beyond the end of the intervention itself.…”

“…Four studies (three pre-post studies and one cross-over study) reported significant improvement in an outcome measure, namely weight loss (n=2) [25,26], physical activity (n=1) [23], and dietary awareness (n=1) [30]. A further four studies, all randomized controlled trials employing alternative intervention controls, reported evidence suggestive of improvement (ie, both groups improved significantly over time, though there was no significant difference between groups) [22,27,28,31].…”

“…Of the four studies that investigated physical activity behavior change and reported sufficient data to enable effect size calculation, the effect size in one study was classified as negligible [28], two as medium (between groups) [23,27], and one as large (between groups) [31]. A small effect size was observed for the one study measuring eating behavior [28].…”