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Understanding user cognitions to guide the tailoring of persuasive technology-based physical activity interventions

The growing number of people with an inactive lifestyle emphasizes the need for highly persuasive physical activity interventions. Modern technological developments bring great promise for the realization of such large-scale persuasive behavior change interventions because they allow for user tailored interaction. For the effective tailoring of technology-based interventions, a profound understanding of the main variables underlying physical activity behavior is required. In this paper, we focus on three cognitive variables that have shown to be crucial for the adoption and maintenance of health behaviors: behavioral regulation, types of motives, and self-efficacy. In particular, we explore the relationship of these cognitive variables with actual levels of daily-life physical activity. Our study differs from related studies in two important ways. First, we consider the entire range of physical activities performed throughout the day while many studies focused on sports and or dedicated exercise. Second, we employ a wearable device for the objective measurement of daily physical activity levels rather than rely on self-report measures. Our results show that active individuals feel higher levels of self-determined behavioral regulation, experience stronger motives to be active (in particular for health and well-being related motives), and have higher levels of self-efficacy for daily-life physical activity than inactive individuals. We argue that tailored technology-based activity interventions should accommodate these cognitive variables and for inactive individuals, aim to gradually induce and internalize the cognitions already experienced by active individuals.