Persuasive health and wellbeing application: A theory-driven design in promoting physical activity

Abstract

People spend a lot of time at their workplace, for example in office environment. After consuming breakfast or lunch during the recess periods, one may feel lazy both physically and mentally. Thus, gaining extra calories may lower the working progress. To motivate individuals for healthier behavior, we designed, executed and tested an application for improving physical activity behavior at workplace. Our health and wellbeing application delivers a physical activity promotion intervention that motivates user performing activities, for example by walking after breakfast or lunch. Our physical activity promotion is based on recent research showing that one can be motivated extrinsically through satisfaction of three basic psychological needs (autonomy, competence and relatedness) that are influenced by autonomy support. We conducted a one week long usability evaluation on users for the health and wellbeing application. We found that the application works well for physical activity promotion.

A Scoping Review of Digital Tools to Reduce Sedentary Behavior or Increase Physical Activity in Knowledge Workers

“…Of the 45 studies, 34 did not specify a theoretical underpinning of their design. Of the 11 papers that did use a theoretical model, the most commonly used theory was the transtheoretical model (25%) [37,58,68], followed by the theory of planned behavior (17%) [41,46] and self-determination theory (17%) [50,74]. Five other papers based their designs on, respectively, persuasive system design model [65], goal setting theory [55], distributed prospective memory approach [48], social cognitive theory [38] and social learning theory combined with the theory of reasoned action [46].…”

“…Physical activity [35,43,46,53,58,65,66,74,77] Sedentary behavior [36,45,48,60] Not defined [12,34,[37][38][39][40][41][42]44,47,[49][50][51][52][54][55][56][57]59,[61][62][63][64][67][68][69][70][71][72][73]75,76] Although the majority of the papers did not provide a definition of SB or PA, a general distribution of the main targeted behavior could be made based on the description of the interventions. Just over half of the interventions targeted PA (24) while 9 interventions targeted SB and 12 targeted both PA and SB.…”

Towards Value Propositions for Persuasive Health and Wellbeing Applications

“…To evaluate our proposed VPs, we analyzed two developed persuasive health and wellbeing applications, iCrave to promote healthy eating [31], and iGO to promote physical activity [32]. Both applications are designed with an aim that users are satisfied by perceiving higher value from the application, i.e.…”