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

Abstract

<div lang="en" class="abs"><p class="abs_header">Abstract</p><p>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.</p></div>