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Persuasive technology in the real world: a study of long-term use of activity sensing devices for fitness

Published: 26 April 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Persuasive technology to motivate healthy behavior is a growing area of research within HCI and ubiquitous computing. The emergence of commercial wearable devices for tracking health- and fitness-related activities arguably represents the first widespread adoption of dedicated ubiquitous persuasive technology. The recent ubiquity of commercial systems allows us to learn about their value and use in truly "in the wild" contexts and understand how practices evolve over long-term, naturalistic use. We present a study with 30 participants who had adopted wearable activity-tracking devices of their own volition and had continued to use them for between 3 and 54 months. The findings, which both support and contrast with those of previous research, paint a picture of the evolving benefits and practices surrounding these emerging technologies over long periods of use. They also serve as the basis for design implications for personal informatics technologies for long-term health and fitness support.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '14: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2014
    4206 pages
    ISBN:9781450324731
    DOI:10.1145/2556288
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 26 April 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. activity monitoring
    2. behavior change
    3. health
    4. personal informatics
    5. persuasive technology
    6. wearable sensing

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    April 26 - May 1, 2014
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    • (2024)Key influences on university students’ physical activity: a systematic review using the Theoretical Domains Framework and the COM-B model of human behaviourBMC Public Health10.1186/s12889-023-17621-424:1Online publication date: 9-Feb-2024
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