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Exploring Social Accountability for Pervasive Fitness Apps

Authors:
Yu Chen
Jiyong Zhang
Pearl Pu

Keywords: health; pervasive fitness applications; gamification; competition; social accountability.

Abstract:
Mobile fitness applications have gained increasing popularity to help users walk and exercise more. A key component in such apps is its ability to motivate users. Traditional gamification methods have focused on competition such as leaderboard for community users, self-reflection for individual users, or a combination of the two. Motivated by recent work showing a promising effect of social capital, we have designed and developed a mobile game, HealthyTogether, based on such ideas. We are further interested in how users behave in different settings of gamification methods compared to a baseline. To this end, we have designed and conducted an in-depth user study (N=24) involving 12 dyads playing these games in 4 conditions over a period of two weeks. We report here the design of the application as well as the user study. Among the various rewarding schemes, one that uses a hybrid concept of competition and social accountability gives the most desirable outcome.

Pages: 221 to 226

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2014

Publication date: August 24, 2014

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4278

ISBN: 978-1-61208-353-7

Location: Rome, Italy

Dates: from August 24, 2014 to August 28, 2014