Evitapp: Persuasive Application for Physical Activity and Smoking Cessation

Abstract

The most important risk factors for cardiovascular health are smoking and a sedentary lifestyle. This paper proposes Evitapp, a mobile application designed to promote physical activity and smoking cessation. The application does not use additional tracking devices, rather relying on phone sensors to track physical activity, and on users logging their behavior. Nineteen users tested the application over 10 days. Participants found the applications easy to use and used them approximately once per day. Even though the habits of the experiment participants did not change significantly, those who used the smoking cessation application reported decreasing their smoking habit.

Social+Me: a persuasive application to increase communication between students and their support networks in Southern Chile

“…To develop the application, we started by defining the persuasive strategies, based on a recent survey of persuasive technologies for health and wellness ( Orji & Moffatt, 2018 ), a review of existing applications available in the Google Play store ( 7 Weeks, 2019 ; Familyar, 2019 ; PhoneWatcher, 2019 ), and previous experience in the development of persuasive applications ( Bascur et al, 2018 ). From this analysis, we chose six persuasive strategies to incorporate into our application.…”

“…We used the metaphor of a tree in a field , which we had used previously ( Bascur et al, 2018 ; Rossel et al, 2019 ), to organize the persuasive strategies in an understandable and coherent way. A similar concept (using a garden) was used for Ubifit Garden ( Consolvo et al, 2008 ), and similar ideas have been used previously with positive results ( Oyebode, Maurya & Orji, 2020 ).…”

Designing a Persuasive Application for Behaviour Change with Children:

“…According to Fogg (2011), persuasive technology can be defined as "technology that is designed to change attitudes or behaviour of the users in a predetermined way". There is also a growing number of technologies to encourage individuals to change their behaviour particularly towards a healthy lifestyle such as increase physical activity (Mohadis & Ali, 2016), healthy diet intake (Rahman et al 2018), smoking cessation (Bascur et al 2018) and weight reduction (Vlahu-Gjorgievska, Unnikrishnan & Win, 2018).…”

SAS4P: Providing automatic smoking detection for a persuasive smoking cessation application

“…Evitapp is a persuasive application, developed for Android 4.4., which has two versions with a high software reuse between both: one for smoking cessation and one for physical activity promotion. 38 Naturally, this article focuses mostly on the smoking cessation application, but both applications share a common metaphor and a large number of core services. To develop these applications, we started by defining the persuasive strategies, based on literature concerning persuasive technology for health and wellness, 39 physical activity, [40][41][42] and smoking cessation, 25,43,44 as well as a review of existing applications in the app stores.…”