Clinical trial NCT04691596: Promoting Contextually Cued PA Habits
Official title: Promoting Contextually Cued Physical Activity Habits: A Pilot Study Using Cue-Contingent Financial Incentives for Daily Walking
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: COMPLETED
Phase: NA
Conditions: Exercise
Keywords: Physical activity
Financial incentives
mHealth
Lead sponsor: Arizona State University
Sponsor class: OTHER
First posted: 2020-12-31
Enrollment: 137
Sex: ALL
Minimum age (years): 18
Maximum age (years): 65
Standard ages: ADULT
OLDER_ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: yes
Allocation: RANDOMIZED
Intervention model: PARALLEL
Primary purpose: PREVENTION

Brief summary: The primary goal of this two-month pilot study is to measure the behavioral change induced by targeted habit formation reminders that are surfaced via an iPhone app and financial incentives that were offered conditional on using a personalized contextual cue for a daily walking habit. The data and user feedback collected during this study will also be used to optimize the design and content of the iPhone app, which will be tested in future, larger scale experimental research.

Detailed description: Subjects for this research are recruited on campus at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the State University of New York at Albany, and their participation was incentivized. After meeting the eligibility criterion (including have at least some intrinsic motivation for increasing physical activity), downloading the project's iPhone app, and signing the project consent form, all participants will have their step count data recorded for an 8-week study period.

Existing interventions that have successfully improved study participants' health-related behaviors typically find that behavioral changes do not persist beyond 3 months after the intervention period. Fortunately, novel habit formation interventions from the psychology literature offer the potential for building long-term behavioral change and avoiding the common "relapse triangles" observed in these existing behavioral interventions. These new methods are based on the theory that habits are formed through the repetition of the same behavior in response to a stable, environmental cue. After an initial period of repetition, automaticity is formed, and the behavioral response becomes more effortlessly/unconsciously induced by the environmental cue. Behavioral reminders that reinforce a specific behavioral routine-environmental cue pair have been shown to support this initial period of habit formation; however, given the individualized nature of these reminders, a generalizable intervention method has not been developed and empirically tested. This research will use an iPhone app to examine the role of both general informational on contextually cued habits and the use of personalized reminders and financial incentives for using a daily physical activity contextual cue on the persistence of physical activity behavior after the intervention tools are withdrawn.

Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria:

* 18+ years of age
* Have an existing wellness goal related to increasing physical activity
* Access to an iPhone with iOS 10 or above (in order to use the app)
* Proficiency in speaking and reading English

Exclusion Criteria:

* Have a major visual impairment
* Pregnancy
* Expected surgery
* A chronic or acute health condition that affects their ability to perform basic mobility tasks or light-aerobic exercise (e.g. heart disease, injured or missing limb, etc.)

Primary outcomes:
measure: Daily Step Count
timeFrame: 8 weeks
measure: Daily Step Count
timeFrame: 4 weeks
Secondary outcomes:
measure: Habitual daily walking
timeFrame: 8 weeks
measure: Habitual daily walking
timeFrame: 4 weeks
measure: 10,000 daily step
timeFrame: 4 weeks
Other outcomes:
Locations:
city: Troy
country: United States
facility: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
state: New York
Study officials:
References:
citation: Stawarz, Cox, and Blandford. 2015. "Beyond self-tracking and reminders: designing smartphone apps that support habit formation." Proceedings of the 33rd annual ACM conference on human factors in computing systems, ACM.
citation: Lally, Phillippa, et al. 2010. "How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world." European journal of social psychology 40(6): 998-1009.
citation: Wood W, Neal DT. A new look at habits and the habit-goal interface. Psychol Rev. 2007 Oct;114(4):843-63. doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.114.4.843.
citation: Wood and Neal. 2016. "Healthy through habit: Interventions for initiating & maintaining health behavior change." Behavioral Science & Policy 2(1): 71-83.
citation: Adriaanse MA, Gollwitzer PM, De Ridder DT, de Wit JB, Kroese FM. Breaking habits with implementation intentions: a test of underlying processes. Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 2011 Apr;37(4):502-13. doi: 10.1177/0146167211399102. Epub 2011 Feb 11.