Promoting physical activity through internet: a persuasive technology view

  • Authors:
  • Weimo Zhu

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Kinesiology & Community Health, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL

  • Venue:
  • PERSUASIVE'07 Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Persuasive technology
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Participation in regular physical activity (PA) is critical to sustaining good health. While a few attempts have been made to use internet-based interventions to promote PA, no system review has been conducted in determining the effectiveness of the intervention. The purpose of this study was to conduct a review under the framework of persuasive technology (PT). Based on a comprehensive of literature search, nice experimental studies were identified and evaluated using the PT functional triad defined by Fogg in 2003[1]. It was found that only two studies led to short-term impact in promoting PA and, furthermore, two studies have found that the intervention based traditional print materials worked better. From a perspective of PT, none of the studies designed its intervention based on the framework of captology and few took full advantages of PT functions. Designing new-generation, PT based internet intervention and examining related human factors are urgently needed.