| Notes |
VERA: mobile phone-based health behavior tracking and community
How can mobile phones can be used to employ various forms of motivation-both social and individual-to encourage healthy behavior? Intrinsic motivators are innate motivational factors such as competition, cooperation, control, and recognition that have been leveraged to bring about behavior change in many circumstances. Social influence has been shown to play an important role in persuasion and the motivation of behavior change; countless studies, both involving technology and not, have shown that individuals grouped with peers have better results in alcohol and smoking cessation, losing weight, exercising, and even surviving cancer. Through good design, all of these motivational factors can be employed and studied in mobile phone applications. We have developed and pilot-tested a health behavior application called VERA in which users take photos to document health-related behaviors, then rate and reflect on their own behaviors as well as those of their peers. Preliminary data show that individuals using VERA exhibit generally healthier behavior than those who don't, and that individuals using VERA with their peers are healthier yet. Furthermore, VERA collects volumes of highly valuable data, explicitly documenting the day-to-day health-related behavior with associated stress and emotional state of participants. This represents great promise for the use of cell phones as a means of encouraging healthier behaviors related to weight loss and the prevention of obesity. |