Flowie: A persuasive virtual coach to motivate elderly individuals to walk

Web-Based Physical Activity Interventions for Older Adults: A Review

“…Out of fifteen studies, only five specifically aim to investigate the efficacy of the interventions in increasing the level of physical activity among participants [12,13,14,15,16]. Another six studies aim to investigate the effectiveness of design components in encouraging physical activity [17,18,19,20,21,22]. Albaina et al [17] for example aims to evaluate persuasive design principles and interaction metaphors in Flowie, a persuasive virtual coach that encourages seniors to walk more.…”

“…Another six studies aim to investigate the effectiveness of design components in encouraging physical activity [17,18,19,20,21,22]. Albaina et al [17] for example aims to evaluate persuasive design principles and interaction metaphors in Flowie, a persuasive virtual coach that encourages seniors to walk more. Silveira et al [21] focuses on the efficacy of motivational elements in ActiveLifestyle, whilst Hughes et al [20] on the efficacy of online consultation.…”

“…Examples of objective measurements used in these identified studies include the use of RT3 accelerometer [12], ActiPED pedometer [17] or ankle/wrist-work accelerometer [16]. Subjective measurements used, on the other hand, include self-reported 7-Day Physical Activity Recall (7-D PAR) [12,19], Dutch Short Questionnaire to Assess Health Enhancing Physical Activity (SQUASH) [23,24,25] and validated Physical Activity Scale for the Elderly (PASE) [14].…”

“…Six of these studies focus only on an older adult population [14,15,16,17,21,23], while three physical activity interventions developed for a general population [12,19,22]. The remaining six studies only described physical activity as sub-components of the interventions, as these studies involved interventions that were not mainly developed to enhance physical activity but to encourage weight loss [26], fall prevention [18], weight maintenance [13], general health assessment [20,24] and health behaviour change [25].…”

“…Out of nine interventions with physical activity as the main component, three studies utilized objective physical activity measurements [16,17,21], four studies utilize subjective measurement [15,16,19,23], while two studies [12,14] utilized both types of measurement. Meanwhile, all of the remaining six studies with physical activity as subcomponents of the interventions only used subjective measurements such as self-reported questionnaires to measure physical activity outcome [13,18,20,26,24,25].…”