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Work or Workout? Designing Interactive Technology for Workplace Fitness Promotion
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The rapid penetration of labor-saving devices and task-oriented workplace norms have substantially reduced physical exercises while increasing sedentary behaviors in many office-based jobs. The prevalence of physical inactivity at work increases the risks of developing metabolic disorders, mental illnesses, and musculoskeletal injuries, threatening office workers’ physical and psychological well-being. To tackle such issue, many strategies have been proposed to facilitate workplace fitness initiatives, such as public policies, organizational wellness programs, promotional materials, and socioenvironmental changes, etc. However, it is challenging to reach the goals of these top-down strategies, once their applications fail to blend physical activity into everyday work and persuade individuals to keep up fitness levels in office settings. The emerging fitness-promoting technologies may be leveraged to support active lifestyles in the workday context. Through integrating ubiquitous sensing and human-computer interaction (HCI), interactive technologies can sense physical states of office workers and use that information to engage them in office exercises in the short-term as well as encourage their systemic behavior change in the long-term. This doctoral dissertation therefore explores this new perspective of office vitality: How to design interactive technology to facilitate workplace fitness promotion?
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... Yet, either the bottom-up or the top-down strategies have their limitations. With a strong engineering focus, ID research projects have generated applications for vitality promotion in various social contexts [18,19]. However, technological developments have been criticized for the ignorance of larger contextual information, such as policy and built environments [11]. ...
With the rapid advance of information communication technologies, unprecedented volumes of environmental and behavioral data have been generated and provided researchers with new pathways to develop strategies and interventions. In digital public health, there has been an emerging interest in promoting vitality based on multidisciplinary research. However, few works have been conducted on facilitating data-related collaboration in vitality research. This paper presents a survey study for the development of a data-driven service system to support multidisciplinary collaboration in vitality-related projects. Our survey received responses from 38 researchers, primarily from Industrial Design and Geoscience. From this survey, we learned both common ground and different research experiences between the two disciplines, regarding the collection, management, and analysis of data. Based on our findings, we proposed a system architecture of a data platform, and specified a set of functions that can assist researchers working from different disciplines in sharing, collection, processing, and analyzing vitality-related research data.
This research was motivated by a desire to help office workers change their sedentary behavior because a prolonged sedentary posture increases the risks of developing musculoskeletal injuries and chronic diseases, thus threatening their physical and psychological well-being. Regular breaks involving low-effort physical activities are effective in reducing the adverse impacts of inactive behaviors. In this article, we present the design of a posture-based interactive system called HealthSit, which was developed to promote a short lower-back stretching exercise during work breaks. Through a within-subject study involving 30 office workers, the effectiveness of HealthSit in facilitating the stretching exercise was examined by making comparisons between an interaction-aided, a guided, and a self-directed exercise mode. We also used HealthSit as a research probe to investigate the interactivity of the system in enhancing user experience and the psychological benefits of the fitness breaks. Compared with the other two modes, the interaction-aided exercise mode significantly improved the quality of the stretching exercise and enhanced motivation and emotional state. These results confirm the effectiveness of HealthSit in supporting fitness breaks as a new workplace technology. Based on our study, a set of design implications have been derived for technology-assisted fitness work breaks.
Extended periods of uninterrupted sedentary behavior are detrimental to long-term health. While prolonged sitting is prevalent among information workers, it is difficult for them to break prolonged sedentary behavior due to the nature of their work. This work aims to understand information workers' intentions & practices around standing or moving breaks. We developed Time for Break, a break prompting system that enables people to set their desired work duration and prompts them to stand up or move. We conducted an exploratory field study (N = 25) with Time for Break to collect participants' work & break intentions and behaviors for three weeks, followed by semi-structured interviews. We examined rich contexts affecting participants' receptiveness to standing or moving breaks, and identified how their habit strength and self-regulation are related to their break-taking intentions & practices. We discuss design implications for interventions to break up periods of prolonged sedentary behavior in workplaces.
This paper presents BioFidget, a biofeedback system that integrates physiological sensing and display into a smart fidget spinner for respiration training. We present a simple yet novel hardware design that transforms a fidget spinner into 1) a nonintrusive heart rate variability (HRV) sensor, 2) an electromechanical respiration sensor, and 3) an information display. The combination of these features enables users to engage in respiration training through designed tangible and embodied interactions, without requiring them to wear additional physiological sensors. The results of this empirical user study prove that the respiration training method reduces stress, and the proposed system meets the requirements of sensing validity and engagement with 32 participants in a practical setting.
Social support can improve adherence to physical activity and healthy eating behavior change, and recently, smartphone fitness applications which provide interventions to groups of users are increasingly popular. However the types of social support provided in the applications, and the features/approaches used to offer the support, vary widely. It is unknown which approach best meets users’ requirements. We conducted a mixed methods study to identify user requirements for social support in group fitness applications. We then developed MyFitnessTeam based on these requirements and evaluated it in a six-week field study. We found that participants desired informational and emotional support, and for group fitness applications to provide daily challenges that they could complete with their support network. MyFitnessTeam significantly improved adherence to fitness behaviors, with men having significantly higher adherence levels than women and participants who were inactive at baseline achieving similar adherence levels to the most baseline-active participants. Groups of friends were more likely to exchange informational support but emotional support was low for both friends and strangers, due to lack of knowledge on when and how to offer such support. We propose 5 design recommendations to promote supportive interactions in group fitness applications.
Physical Education (PE) is beneficial for students' mental and physical health, however, teenagers are increasingly becoming less motivated to actively participate in the current form of PE. Motivational studies show that collective physical activity augmented by playful interactions could encourage more participation and social engagement in physical activities (PA). In this paper, we present a within-subject field study with 20 teenagers formed into five groups sized equally. The study is conducted using Shuttlezap, a prototype that provides real-time playful audio augmentation to the process of the activity. Results show that the teenagers enjoyed playful audio augmentation and were socially engaged with an enhancement of their perception of competence. By further comparing the conditions between with and without the audio augmentation, we found that the playful audio augmentation positively contributed to the playfulness in terms of perceived relaxation and expression. We conclude with design implications for social play in the context of PE for teenagers.
The workplace is becoming increasingly mobile, as more and more employees regularly work from their home office, spend a lot of time travelling, work on-site at their customers’ place, and use laptops and mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets instead of classical desktop computers. However, while research and checklists on how to create an ergonomic office are readily available, less is known about how the ‘mobile workplace’ should be designed to reduce strains and stress resulting from unfavourable workplace conditions, non-ergonomic equipment or devices, extensive travelling, or work-home interference. In this paper we present the results of an empirical study on the ergonomic requirements of mobile workers. Based on this, we present the ‘Ergonomics Coach’, a prototype of an online coaching application with helpful information and exercises adapted to the mobile workplace.