An Approach to Improve Physical Activity by Generating Individual Implementation Intentions

Abstract

Daily physical activity not only empowers the body, but it also invigorates the mind and helps people cope with the struggle of everyday life. A balanced amount of moderate to vigorous physical activity is recommended. Major barriers that lead to low levels of physical activity are lack of time and motivation. The objective of this paper is to generate individual recommendations to improve physical activity by using if-then plans - so called Implementation Intentions. We developed a mobile application named DayActivizer to collect all the necessary activity data by the user. Based on the collected data, the application automatically recommends activities within if-then plans with an increasing degree of physical effort to counteract insufficient physical exercise concerning individual daily routine. To evaluate our approach, we conducted a field study (N=8) and qualitative interviews in which every participant was asked to examine the validity of the individual recommended implementation intentions.