The Influence of Message Framing on Engagement with a Mobile Application for Motivating Exercise

Abstract

Mobile phone personal health monitoring software is designed to help people monitor and change their behavior. Exercise applications may measure heart rate, temperature, distance traveled, and movement. Although some of these programs incorporate behavioral theories to motivate engagement and behavior change, it is not yet clear that the devices can maintain engagement long term for individuals who are not strongly inclined to exercise already. If people do not use health apps for long periods of time - weeks, months or years instead of days - there are unlikely to be long-term health benefits. This paper describes a new mobile health application designed to motivate exercise via brisk walking: MyWalk. MyWalk delivers timely, tailored feedback messages intended to persuade additional brisk walking. An experiment was conducted to explore how message framing impacts application usage using participants who downloaded the application from an online app store. Author Keywords: Engagement, Health, Mobile, Phone, Pervasive Technology, Reinforcement, Personal Health Informatics, Design, Human-Computer Interaction. ACM Classification Keywords H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous.