Activity Monitors as Support for Older Persons’ Physical Activity in Daily Life: Qualitative Study of the Users’ Experiences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Falls are a major threat to the health and independence of seniors. Regular physical activity (PA) can prevent 40% of all fall injuries. The challenge is to motivate and support seniors to be physically active. Persuasive systems can constitute valuable support for persons aiming at establishing and maintaining healthy habits. However, these systems need to support effective behavior change techniques (BCTs) for increasing older adults' PA and meet the senior users' requirements and preferences. Therefore, involving users as codesigners of new systems can be fruitful. Prestudies of the user's experience with similar solutions can facilitate future user-centered design of novel persuasive systems. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to investigate how seniors experience using activity monitors (AMs) as support for PA in daily life. The addressed research questions are as follows: (1) What are the overall experiences of senior persons, of different age and balance function, in using wearable AMs in daily life?; (2) Which aspects did the users perceive relevant to make the measurements as meaningful and useful in the long-term perspective?; and (3) What needs and requirements did the users perceive as more relevant for the activity monitors to be useful in a long-term perspective? METHODS: This qualitative interview study included 8 community-dwelling older adults (median age: 83 years). The participants' experiences in using two commercial AMs together with tablet-based apps for 9 days were investigated. Activity diaries during the usage and interviews after the usage were exploited to gather user experience. Comments in diaries were summarized, and interviews were analyzed by inductive content analysis. RESULTS: The users (n=8) perceived that, by using the AMs, their awareness of own PA had increased. However, the AMs' impact on the users' motivation for PA and activity behavior varied between participants. The diaries showed that self-estimated physical effort varied between participants and varied for each individual over time. Additionally, participants reported different types of accomplished activities; talking walks was most frequently reported. To be meaningful, measurements need to provide the user with a reliable receipt of whether his or her current activity behavior is sufficient for reaching an activity goal. Moreover, praise when reaching a goal was described as motivating feedback. To be useful, the devices must be easy to handle. In this study, the users perceived wearables as easy to handle, whereas tablets were perceived difficult to maneuver. Users reported in the diaries that the devices had been functional 78% (58/74) of the total test days. CONCLUSIONS: Activity monitors can be valuable for supporting seniors' PA. However, the potential of the solutions for a broader group of seniors can significantly be increased. Areas of improvement include reliability, usability, and content supporting effective BCTs with respect to increasing older adults' PA.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".