Integrating Person-to-Person Social Support in Smartphone Apps for Promoting Physical Activity

Bojan Simoski, Michel Klein, Aart T. van Halteren, Henri Bal

2018

Abstract

The epidemic of physical inactivity is a major health hazard in the modern society, therefore creating effective and innovative health programs and interventions are important. This paper presents a novel approach in which person-to-person social support is incorporated in mHealth interventions for increasing physical activity. Social support is already used as a behaviour change technique in mHealth apps for influencing physical activity, but mostly offered virtually. While virtually-offered social support is efficient, we believe that person-to-person communication, based on personal coaching, might open a new way of influencing the inactive users and their motivation. Responding to this, we developed an Android application that facilitates physically inactive users to connect with a real life coach to receive person-to-person social support. This paper explains the motivation behind the system's design decisions and discusses the potential of social support in mHeatlh apps. In addition, we present the design of the evaluation study in which the hypotheses and research questions will be evaluated.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Simoski B., Klein M., van Halteren A. and Bal H. (2018). Integrating Person-to-Person Social Support in Smartphone Apps for Promoting Physical Activity. In Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2018) - Volume 5: HEALTHINF; ISBN 978-989-758-281-3, SciTePress, pages 497-504. DOI: 10.5220/0006644504970504

in Bibtex Style

@conference{healthinf18,
author={Bojan Simoski and Michel Klein and Aart T. van Halteren and Henri Bal},
title={Integrating Person-to-Person Social Support in Smartphone Apps for Promoting Physical Activity},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2018) - Volume 5: HEALTHINF},
year={2018},
pages={497-504},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0006644504970504},
isbn={978-989-758-281-3},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2018) - Volume 5: HEALTHINF
TI - Integrating Person-to-Person Social Support in Smartphone Apps for Promoting Physical Activity
SN - 978-989-758-281-3
AU - Simoski B.
AU - Klein M.
AU - van Halteren A.
AU - Bal H.
PY - 2018
SP - 497
EP - 504
DO - 10.5220/0006644504970504
PB - SciTePress