Toscos, T., Faber, A., Connelly, K., and Upoma, A. M. Encouraging physical activity in teens: Can technology help reduce barriers to physical activity in adolescent girls? In Proceedings of Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare (PervasiveHealth’08) (Tampere, Finland, Jan 30 – Feb 1 2008), pp. 218–221. [PDF]

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This article reports the finding from a three week field trial of technology designed to encourage physical activity in teenage girls by leveraging the power of personal relationships. The author provided 10 subjects with a mobile phone application and a pedometer which work together to provide a group support sytem that promotes walking towards a self-established daily step goal. Entered step counts are shared within the group with text messages.

The authors found that automated messages from the sytem were perceived negatively from the participants. More importantly, they found that competition between friends can be a fun way to create motivation for excercise but if competition is taken too far it may contribute to bad feelings and or bad behavior. Finally, they found that the intimacy of a small group of friends was consistently reported by participants as a benefit. The challenge of persuasive technology is to allow for good peer pressure while minimizing opportunities for bad peer pressure.