Abstract
Background: Many behaviour-change technologies have been designed to help people with a sedentary lifestyle to become more physically active. However, challenges exist in designing systems that work effectively. One of the key challenges is that many of those technologies do not account for differences in individuals’ psychological characteristics. To address that problem, tailoring the communication between a system and its users has been proposed and examined. Although in the research related to public health education, message tailoring has been studied extensively as a technique to communicate health information and to educate people, its use in the design of behaviour-change technologies has not been adequately investigated. Objective: The goal of this study was to explore the impact of message tailoring, when tailoring was grounded in Higgins’ Regulatory Fit Theory, and messages were constructed to promote physical activity. Method: An email intervention was designed and developed that sent participants daily health messages for 14 consecutive days. There were three categories of messages: reminders, promotion-, and prevention-messages. The effect of the messages on behaviour was compared between those who received messages that fitted their self-regulatory orientation, versus those who received non-fitted messages. Results: Participants who received promotion- or prevention-messages walked for longer periods of time, compared to those who received reminders in the control group. When comparing the first two groups, promotion-message-recipients on average walked more than those who received prevention-messages. In other words, promotion messages acted more persuasively than prevention-messages and reminders. Contrary to our hypothesis, those individuals who received messages that fitted their self-regulatory orientation did not walk more than those who received non-fitted messages. Conclusions: The efficacy of Higgins’ Regulatory Fit Theory in the design of tailored health messages was examined. This study did not find support for the use of that theory in guiding the design of persuasive health messages that promote physical activity. Therefore, more research is necessary to investigate the effectiveness of tailoring strategies.
Highlights
Regular physical activity positively affects mental and physical health and reduces the risk of a variety of chronic conditions, including cardiovascular disease and hypertension, type 2 diabetes, certain types of cancer, and depression [1,2]
Due to the uncertainty in the best approach to frame persuasive health messages in the context of physical activity, we conducted a preliminary experiment [20], where we developed and tested a set of persuasive messages to be used in this study
To examine the effectiveness of tailoring grounded on Regulatory Fit Theory for physical activity promoting systems, we designed and conducted two experiments [35,36]
Summary
Regular physical activity positively affects mental and physical health and reduces the risk of a variety of chronic conditions, including cardiovascular disease and hypertension, type 2 diabetes, certain types of cancer, and depression [1,2]. Further research is necessary to investigate how technology can communicate health-related messages to individuals more effectively by tailoring the communication in order to increase the chance of users performing the target behaviour. Public health researchers have studied a wide variety of techniques for tailoring health messages, their findings have not been employed broadly in the design of persuasive systems. In the research related to public health education, message tailoring has been studied extensively as a technique to communicate health information and to educate people, its use in the design of behaviour-change technologies has not been adequately investigated. Objective: The goal of this study was to explore the impact of message tailoring, when tailoring was grounded in Higgins’ Regulatory Fit Theory, and messages were constructed to promote physical activity Those technologies designed to support users in adopting healthier habits are known as persuasive technologies. Simple persuasive interventions that used phone conversations as a communication means [6] have been transformed into advanced mobile or web-based applications that are paired with wearable sensors, such as activity trackers or blood pressure monitors
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