Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Oct 16, 2021
Open Peer Review Period: Oct 16, 2021 - Oct 22, 2021
Date Accepted: Dec 31, 2021
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Design and Evaluation of a Just-in-Time Adaptive Intervention (JITAI) to Reduce Sedentary Behavior at Work: Experimental Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Modern society is becoming increasingly busy and more technology-enabled. It affected the lifestyle and dietary habits towards a lazy lifestyle with higher caloric intake food. It increased the risks of a wide range of chronic diseases, including obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and heart diseases. This transformation drew attention to investigate methods of increasing the level of activity and enhancing the lifestyle of the society.
Objective:
In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of using personalized messages that include user information, user goal, daily routine, and the surrounding environment to increase the level of activity among workers. In this study, we hypothesize: "Sending context-aware motivational messages to workers in sedentary occupations after sitting for 40 minutes can break sedentary behavior and increase daily active time compared to static reminder messages".
Methods:
The user study followed a mixed-methods design approach applied to a between-groups user study. The target population in this study are people who spend most of their working day in sedentary behavior. Questionnaires were distributed to learn participants' demographic information and activity levels. We divided the participants (n=58) into two groups; a control group who are given a mobile application that only sends a static message after prolonged sitting (MotiFit Lite) and an intervention group whose app sends context-aware personalized messages (MotiFit). Both apps log the received messages, the steps count before and after the messages are sent, and the user response to the messages to give an idea of the impact of the messages. The study took 66 days of app usage in participants' daily life. After the study was complete, we conducted semi-structured interviews to get insights into users' experience and the effectiveness of the proposed solution.
Results:
The results showed a significant impact of the message type on breaking inactivity as shown using the Chi-square test (X2=410.1, P<.001). However, the statistical analysis showed no significant impact of the messages type and the overall daily activity using the Mann-Whitney U test (W=572, P=.06).
Conclusions:
The results indicate statistical significance to the relationship between the message type and breaking inactivity, which suggests that context-aware messages have a great impact on breaking sedentary behavior.
Citation
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Copyright
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