It's time for some Alexercise: A comparison between reflection capabilities of activity trackers and intelligent personal assistants

Recently published health reports from governments of western countries and the World Health Organization (WHO) provide insights on health benefits of being physically active. Performing physical activity of moderate intensity is, amongst others, associated with a smaller risk on symptoms of depression, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Despite this information being widely available on the world wide web, one particular form of physical inactivity is still incorporated in the lives of many people: sedentary behaviour. An environment that is especially seductive for this type of physical inactivity is the workplace. Stress, depression, anxiety, and heart diseases are found to be work-related diseases, possibly as a result from sedentary behaviour. As a means of reflecting on physical activity, one could acquire an activity tracker such as FitBit or use one of the many available health monitoring mobile applications. However, it was found that activity trackers may not be very effective for stimulating a physically active lifestyle. In contrast, an emerging phenomenon may be able to do so: the intelligent personal assistant (IPA). In order to be a part of the solution for aforementioned problem, we aim to stimulate reflection on physical activity during work hours in order to incorporate physical activity into daily routines. Therefore, we carried out a user study with 16 participants in two countries. For carrying out this user study, we introduced Alexercise: a system consisting of multiple interacting components, used for collecting, processing and presenting physical activity data. Components in Alexercise exchange data in quasi-real time to provide workers with current representative physical activity data. As part of Alexercise, we developed a custom skill for Alexa to access physical activity data and present these by voice. In addition, we developed a cross-platform mobile application for tracking and reflecting on activity using the React Native framework. We investigated whether IPAs are more effective in stimulating reflection on physical activity, compared to activity trackers. In addition, we asked participants if they felt the need to take active breaks based on the experience of the user study. At last, we intended to compare results of participants who already incorporated physical activity in their lifestyles with participants who have not. In the development process, we encountered many challenges, such as the distribution of mobile applications and Echo Dots to participants in two countries, and facilitating real time tracking and reflecting on physical activity. Collected sensor data for Android smartphones was reported with infrequent intervals, and could therefore not be used to reliably assess physical activity. We investigated and elaborately explained how these challenges can be overcome for future work. In contrast to the challenges, participants reported that they perceived talking to Alexa as intuitive, and the majority of the participants reported that they feel the need to take active breaks based on their participation in the user study.