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How do we engage with activity trackers?: a longitudinal study of Habito

Published: 07 September 2015 Publication History

Abstract

We report on a 10-month in-the-wild study of the adoption, engagement and discontinuation of an activity tracker called Habito, by a sample of 256 users who installed the tracker on their own volition. We found 'readiness' to behavior change to be a strong predictor of adoption (which ranged from 56% to 20%). Among adopters, only a third updated their daily goal, which in turn impacted their physical activity levels. The use of the tracker was dominated by glances -- brief, 5-sec sessions where users called the app to check their current activity levels with no further interaction, while users displayed true lack of interest in historical data. Textual feedback proved highly effective in fueling further engagement with the tracker as well as inducing physical activity. We propose three directions for design: designing for different levels of 'readiness', designing for multilayered and playful goal setting, and designing for sustained engagement.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    UbiComp '15: Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing
    September 2015
    1302 pages
    ISBN:9781450335744
    DOI:10.1145/2750858
    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 ACM 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: 07 September 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. behavior change technologies
    2. personal informatics
    3. persuasive technologies
    4. physical activity trackers

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    • Yahoo! Japan
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    • FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc.
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    • Rakuten Institute of Technology
    • Microsoft
    • Bell Labs
    • SIGCHI
    • Panasonic
    • Telefónica
    • ISTC-PC

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    UbiComp '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 101 of 394 submissions, 26%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 764 of 2,912 submissions, 26%

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    • (2024)Exploring Design Opportunities for Improved Self-motivation in Self-tracking and Health Goal AchievementProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36765018:MHCI(1-17)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2024
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