Motivating Healthy Water Intake through Prompting, Historical Information, and Implicit Feedback

TL;DR

This paper presents Hydroprompt, a system that uses prompting, historical data, and implicit feedback to encourage healthy water intake in work environments, evaluated over a 3-week field study.

Contribution

It introduces Hydroprompt, a novel prototype integrating multiple behavior change techniques for promoting hydration in real-world settings.

Findings

Historical information improved user awareness of hydration patterns.

Implicit feedback subtly influenced drinking behavior.

Explicit prompts effectively reminded users to hydrate.

Abstract

We describe Hydroprompt, a prototype for sensing and motivating healthy water intake in work environments. In a 3-week field deployment of Hydroprompt, we evaluate the effectiveness of three approaches to behavior change: historical information enabling users to compare their water intake lev- els across different times of day and days of week, implicit feedback providing subtle cues to users on the current hydration levels, and explicit prompting at- tempting to remind participants when hydration falls below acceptable levels or when substantial amount of time has elapsed since the last sip.