Push Notifications in Diet Apps: Influencing Engagement Times and Tasks

ABSTRACT

Background: Smartphones have reached levels of popularity and penetration where they are now suitable for use in population health interventions. A key feature of smartphones is push notification or in app messaging service, which can be used to alert users to messages or instructions pertaining to an installed app. Little evidence exists as to the persuasive power of these messages.

Method: We conducted a 24-week live user evaluation of push notifications used in a behavior-based mobile app for a meal replacement program to understand the role of push notifications in persuading users to engage with self-monitoring tasks.

Results: User perception of the prompts were verified through questionnaires, which in conjunction with the interaction logs show that users were tolerant of multiple daily prompts. The decline in compliance to the tasks set, however, shows that while the participants did not object to receiving prompts, they were less likely to respond to them as the study progressed.

Conclusions: Push notifications and user tasks are appropriate mechanisms to engage users with mobile technology in the short term.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jill Freyne

Dr. Jill Freyne is a Principal Research Scientist in the Australian eHealth Research Centre. Jill has significant research experience in the development and validation of digital health services, lifestyle interventions, and recommender systems. Jill is the author of over 60 publications in top tier journals and conferences.

Jie Yin

Dr. Jie Yin is a senior research scientist at CSIRO, Australia. Her main research interests include data mining, machine learning, and their applications to text mining, sensor data mining, and social network analysis. She received a PhD degree in Computer Science from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Emily Brindal

Dr. Emily Brindal has worked in nutrition since 2005, applying her knowledge of psychology to explore the impact of varying foods on cognitive function and how behavioral theory can be incorporated in to eHealth platforms and weight management programs. Emily currently works at CSIRO Food and Nutrition in South Australia.

Gilly A. Hendrie

Dr. Gilly Hendrie is a Research Scientist at CSIRO for Health and Biosecurity. She has a PhD and expertise in diet, nutrition and obesity prevention. She has worked extensively on the development of new tools to measure dietary intake and methods to quantify dietary patterns, including the development of the indices to assess diet quality.

Shlomo Berkovsky

Dr. Shlomo Berkovsky is a Principal Researcher and leader of the Interactive Behavior Analytics team at Data61, CSIRO. He works in the areas of personalization, recommender systems, and persuasive technologies and has authored over a hundred journal and conference papers, edited several books and special issues, and chaired numerous conferences and workshops.

Manny Noakes

Professor Manny Noakes is currently the Research Director for the Food and Nutrition Flagship at the CSIRO. She is considered a key opinion leader and trusted advisor in nutrition and health both nationally and internationally, particularly in the area of higher protein dietary patterns and weight management.