Opening the black box of fitness tracking: understanding the mechanisms of feedback in motivating physical activity among older Singaporeans

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how older adults interact with fitness trackers and how that interaction influences their physical activity. We carried out qualitative interviews with 22 individuals between the ages of 55 and 72 who had used fitness trackers as part of a six-week field experiment investigating the effects of feedback from fitness trackers and the social influence of their spouses. From their comments, we derived an explorative process model explaining the mechanisms and the four stages of effects arising from personalised feedback, namely, cognitive, affective, conative, and intuitive. These effects were grouped into internal and external dimensions. Three types of goal-related decisions determined whether interviewees moved from the internal responses of cognition and emotion to the external response of behaviour change. The findings from this study elucidate how real-time personalised feedback can motivate physical activity among older adults and highlight the goal-related factors that influence this effect.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobile health
• wearables
• fitness trackers
• behaviour change
• personalised feedback
• real-time feedback

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics approval

The ethics committee of Nanyang Technological University approved this study (IRB-2018-12-016). Interviewees signed informed consent forms before participating in the study.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Ministry of Education, Singapore [grant number 2017-T1-002-014].