Effect of Values and Technology Use on Exercise: Implications for Personalized Behavior Change Interventions

TL;DR

This study analyzes how personal values and technology use influence exercise behavior, providing insights to improve personalized health interventions through a large dataset of US residents.

Contribution

It combines technology logs and survey data to model exercise behavior and identifies key values affecting app adoption and activity, offering design guidelines for health tech.

Findings

Values of purity increase likelihood of app use

Socioeconomic status correlates with exercise frequency

App usage data improves activity prediction accuracy

Abstract

Technology has recently been recruited in the war against the ongoing obesity crisis; however, the adoption of Health & Fitness applications for regular exercise is a struggle. In this study, we present a unique demographically representative dataset of 15k US residents that combines technology use logs with surveys on moral views, human values, and emotional contagion. Combining these data, we provide a holistic view of individuals to model their physical exercise behavior. First, we show which values determine the adoption of Health & Fitness mobile applications, finding that users who prioritize the value of purity and de-emphasize values of conformity, hedonism, and security are more likely to use such apps. Further, we achieve a weighted AUROC of .673 in predicting whether individual exercises, and we also show that the application usage data allows for substantially better classification performance (.608) compared to using basic demographics (.513) or internet browsing data (.546). We also find a strong link of exercise to respondent socioeconomic status, as well as the value of happiness. Using these insights, we propose actionable design guidelines for persuasive technologies targeting health behavior modification.