Exploring goal-setting, rewards, self-monitoring, and sharing to motivate physical activity

By Sean A Munson, Sunny Consolvo. International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare, 2012

404 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many people have turned to technological tools to help them be physically active. To better understand how goal-setting, rewards, self-monitoring, and sharing can encourage physical activity, we designed a mobile phone application and deployed it in a four-week field study (n=23). Participants found it beneficial to have secondary and primary weekly goals and to receive non-judgmental reminders. However, participants had problems with some features that are commonly used in practice and suggested in the literature. For example, trophies and ribbons failed to motivate most participants, which raises questions about how such rewards should be designed. A feature to post updates to a subset of their Facebook NewsFeed created some benefits, but barriers remained for most participants.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Sociology and Political Science, Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2db9b3ac3e2573e8da76307ae96598a2b9462570

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Citations in the corpus

An Overview of Chatbot-Based Mobile Mental Health Apps: Insights From App Description and User Reviews (2022, positive): “Consistent with previous work on persuasive technology in MH [80-82], we found that daily check-ins, gamification, reminders, and self-monitoring were perceived as helpful features, although they were prescriptive in nature.”
A lived informatics model of personal informatics (2015, background): “Adding features that let people share progress may create channels for accountability [27,28], but merely having a record in the tool or online can also help motivate people and make them feel accountable to the tool [26].”
No longer wearing: investigating the abandonment of personal health-tracking technologies on craigslist (2015, background): “HCI researchers have begun to address this issue through empirical study (such as Munson & Consolvo’s research on goal-setting for physical activity [33]).”