PersonA: A Sharing Platform for Physical Activity Promotion

Advances in physical activity (PA) monitoring devices, such as smartphone-based pedometers, provide ample opportunities for innovations in the way the information produced by these devices is used to encourage people to have more active lifestyles. One such innovation is expanding the current use of the information not only for self-management but also for social support. The innovation is also driven by the fact that social support has significant effects on an individual’s health outcome. We thus developed a platform called Persuasive social network for physical Activity (PersonA) that combines automatic input of physical activity data, smartphone, and social networking system (SNS). PersonA is designed to intelligently and automatically receive raw PA data from the sensors, calculate the data into meaningful PA information, store the information in a secure server, and show the information to the users as persuasive and real-time feedbacks or publish the information to the SNS to generate social support. Using the platform, users can perform the most important self-management practices: self-measurement, self-monitoring, and self-comparison. To accommodate social support, the platform allows users to do the following important practices: peer-support, social comparison-competition, and social support. To maximize the effects of PersonA in encouraging people to perform better in PA, the persuasiveness requirements of the platform are addressed using the following methods: bundling with an application that has psychological and social value to the users, Facebook; designing interactive, personalized, and stratified interface based on PA status; implementing task simplicity; and prompting information in the most opportune moment. The implementation of self-monitoring, social support, and persuasive concepts using current technologies has the potential for promoting healthier lifestyle, greater community participation, and higher quality of life. We also expect that PersonA will enable health professionals and researchers to collect in situ data related to physical activity and its contextual information such as weather, temperature, air pollution, and geographical position. PersonA is a general platform that can work on various health-intervention and rehabilitation applications using self-management and social support as the main strategies. From the technological perspective, the difference in these applications lies mainly in the data collected, information presented, and data point of input (sensors); but they are generally the same in communication infrastructure and interface for information presentation. Currently, PersonA has been successfully implemented in two applications: physical activity monitoring and sharing (PAMS) application for wheelchair users and pedometer application. Both applications are specifically designed to record PA (number of steps for pedometer, energy expenditure, duration, and distance travelled, and intensity level) and to give online social-support capabilities to its users. Each of these systems is currently being used and tested to improve PA level of a group of users in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. []