The lack of physical activity is a leading cause of preventable death globally. For most people, failure to exercise is unlikely to be due to ignorance or lack of interest. While individuals are frequently motivated to start exercising in order to reduce and reverse different health risks, they often encounter difficulties in forming a sustained behavioural change--a habit. Habits are behaviours repeated in the same setting. NISIHealth aimed: A. to develop information-theoretic measures of regularity and predictability in fitness behaviour which can be used as new measures of habits that better predict future retention, B. to understand the role of digital nudges and economic incentives in fitness habit formation and C. to investigate how social influence enhances individual habit formation in the age social media. To assess these research questions, the fellow -- in collaboration with a global exercise tracking companies -- devised methodologies currently used in information theory and statistics on large scale historical individual datasets of fitness activity. In addition, the action made extensive use of surveys and high-fidelity randomized control experiments to validate empirical results and establish causal relationships. The complementarity between the expertise of supervision and the fellow’s qualification as well as the arrangements and environment provided by the host institution help towards the success of this ground-breaking and timely project as well as an effective dissemination and utilization of the outcomes. The conclusions of the proposed action could have important implications to health agencies in EU and around the world and may shape the way public health policy is imposed.
The action objectives are the exploration of the role of individual habits in the long-term fitness behaviour as well as the causal effect of digital nudges, incentives and social influence in motivating people’s healthy behaviour change. The action aimed to use big data analytics on individual-level historical data from a global fitness tracker as well as devise state-of-the-art digital field experiments to end up with high impact conclusions regarding human behavioural changes in exercise. The current project is potentially of major interest to public health agencies in Europe Union but also globally and can potentially shape the way health recommendation policy is imposed.
Under the course of the action we conducted a field experiement in collaboration with Runkeeper to show that social influence is an important motivation factor for people to exercise. We further build information theoretic measures of habits and we showed that habitual individual are less susceptible to social influence.
The action objectives could not be rigorously implemented without the help and collaboration of fitness trackers. The fellow set up a collaboration with the data science teams of Runkeeper and WeRun, two of the leading fitness trackers. Runkeeper is a smartphone application that has recently become one of the world’s most popular personal fitness programs, counting more than 50M users worldwide out of which 23M resides in the European Union region. This application tracks performance over time, allowing users to view a detailed history of activities; get notifications for new personal "bests" and milestones; measure progress against current goals and follow detailed plans. Runkeeper allows users to share their personal content with friends through posting activities, achievements and plans to the app-embedded running-buddy network as well as share their performance to other social channels like Facebook and Twitter. The fellow’s collaboration with Runkeeper, offers a tremendous research opportunity and a promising asset for Europe.
