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Users’ experiences of wearable activity trackers: a cross-sectional study
BACKGROUND: Wearable activity trackers offer considerable promise for helping users to adopt healthier lifestyles. This study aimed to explore users’ experience of activity trackers, including usage patterns, sharing of data to social media, perceived behaviour change (physical activity, diet and sl...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
BioMed Central
2017
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5688726/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29141607 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-017-4888-1 |
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author | Maher, Carol Ryan, Jillian Ambrosi, Christina Edney, Sarah |
author_facet | Maher, Carol Ryan, Jillian Ambrosi, Christina Edney, Sarah |
author_sort | Maher, Carol |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: Wearable activity trackers offer considerable promise for helping users to adopt healthier lifestyles. This study aimed to explore users’ experience of activity trackers, including usage patterns, sharing of data to social media, perceived behaviour change (physical activity, diet and sleep), and technical issues/barriers to use. METHODS: A cross-sectional online survey was developed and administered to Australian adults who were current or former activity tracker users. Results were analysed descriptively, with differences between current and former users and wearable brands explored using independent samples t-tests, Mann-Whitney, and chi square tests. RESULTS: Participants included 200 current and 37 former activity tracker users (total N = 237) with a mean age of 33.1 years (SD 12.4, range 18–74 years). Fitbit (67.5%) and Garmin devices (16.5%) were most commonly reported. Participants typically used their trackers for sustained periods (5–7 months) and most intended to continue usage. Participants reported they had improved their physical activity (51–81%) more commonly than they had their diet (14–40%) or sleep (11–24%), and slightly more participants reported to value the real time feedback (89%) compared to the long-term monitoring (78%). Most users (70%) reported they had experienced functionality issues with their devices, most commonly related to battery life and technical difficulties. CONCLUSIONS: Results suggest users find activity trackers appealing and useful tools for increasing perceived physical activity levels over a sustained period. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12889-017-4888-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5688726 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2017 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-56887262017-11-24 Users’ experiences of wearable activity trackers: a cross-sectional study Maher, Carol Ryan, Jillian Ambrosi, Christina Edney, Sarah BMC Public Health Research Article BACKGROUND: Wearable activity trackers offer considerable promise for helping users to adopt healthier lifestyles. This study aimed to explore users’ experience of activity trackers, including usage patterns, sharing of data to social media, perceived behaviour change (physical activity, diet and sleep), and technical issues/barriers to use. METHODS: A cross-sectional online survey was developed and administered to Australian adults who were current or former activity tracker users. Results were analysed descriptively, with differences between current and former users and wearable brands explored using independent samples t-tests, Mann-Whitney, and chi square tests. RESULTS: Participants included 200 current and 37 former activity tracker users (total N = 237) with a mean age of 33.1 years (SD 12.4, range 18–74 years). Fitbit (67.5%) and Garmin devices (16.5%) were most commonly reported. Participants typically used their trackers for sustained periods (5–7 months) and most intended to continue usage. Participants reported they had improved their physical activity (51–81%) more commonly than they had their diet (14–40%) or sleep (11–24%), and slightly more participants reported to value the real time feedback (89%) compared to the long-term monitoring (78%). Most users (70%) reported they had experienced functionality issues with their devices, most commonly related to battery life and technical difficulties. CONCLUSIONS: Results suggest users find activity trackers appealing and useful tools for increasing perceived physical activity levels over a sustained period. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12889-017-4888-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. BioMed Central 2017-11-15 /pmc/articles/PMC5688726/ /pubmed/29141607 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-017-4888-1 Text en © The Author(s). 2017 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Maher, Carol Ryan, Jillian Ambrosi, Christina Edney, Sarah Users’ experiences of wearable activity trackers: a cross-sectional study |
title | Users’ experiences of wearable activity trackers: a cross-sectional study |
title_full | Users’ experiences of wearable activity trackers: a cross-sectional study |
title_fullStr | Users’ experiences of wearable activity trackers: a cross-sectional study |
title_full_unstemmed | Users’ experiences of wearable activity trackers: a cross-sectional study |
title_short | Users’ experiences of wearable activity trackers: a cross-sectional study |
title_sort | users’ experiences of wearable activity trackers: a cross-sectional study |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5688726/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29141607 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-017-4888-1 |
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