More than step count: designing a workplace-based activity tracking system
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
More than step count: designing a workplace-based activity tracking system Dhaval Vyas 1
&
Thilina Halloluwa 2 & Nikolaj Heinzler 2 & Jinglan Zhang 2
Received: 19 October 2018 / Accepted: 23 August 2019 # Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract The ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach used in current activity tracking devices such as FitBit, Jawbone, and smartwatches may not be enough to encourage healthier behaviour patterns in people, as much more considerate design is required to create meaningful experiences. This paper focuses on designing an activity tracking system that can be used in a workplace setting. We apply a grounded approach, where we aim to understand employee’s perceptions of physical activities at workplaces and the role an activity tracker can play in supporting that. We describe a three-phase design process, which involves (1) interviewing employees who participated in a large-scale employer-sponsored health and wellness programme, (2) two participatory design workshops that aimed at understanding the role of activity tracking in workplace contexts and generating ideas for activity tracking applications, and (3) studying the use of the resulting design prototype—QUTgo—as a ‘technology probe’ to gather insights into the potential of physical activity tracking in workplaces. This paper contributes to the emerging repoirtoire of studies on activity tracking by providing a user-centric perspective on how to design an engaging activity tracking system that takes into account employees’ perspectives and experiences and the dynamics of specific work settings. Keywords Activity tracking . Design . Workplaces . Mobile app . Physical activities
1 Introduction The lack of physical activities can increase the likelihood of chronic heart diseases, diabetes, and high blood pressure [26]. Prior work in the area of personal informatics [9, 14, 31, 34, 35] has shown that technology can play an important role in improving peoples’ health and wellbeing. As a result, researchers have focused on encouraging and motivating people to make better dietary decisions [12], to monitor their sleep [15], to understand health-related behaviours and patterns [14], and to be more physically active [7]. With the emergence of technologies such as wearable activity-sensing devices (e.g. Fitbit, Nike FuelBand), the focus of researchers has shifted to understanding the effects of long-term use of these devices [5, 11, 29]. Furthermore, studies have also focused on finding
* Dhaval Vyas [email protected] 1
University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia
2
Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, QLD 4000, Australia
ways to better represent data collected from these devices so that the users can meaningfully understand their own data [14]. Although people spend a good amount of time in their workplaces, the application and use of activity tracking systems within workplace settings have been relatively less studied within the human-computer interaction (HCI) literature
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