Happier Together: Integrating a Wellness Application into a Social Network Site

Abstract

Abstract.What are the benefits and drawbacks of integrating health and wellness interventions into existing online social network websites? In this paper, we report on a case study of deploying the Three Good Things positive psychology exercise as a Facebook application. Our experience shows that embedding a wellness intervention in an existing social website is a viable option. In particular, we find adherence rates on par with or better than many other Internet-based wellness interventions. We also gained insights about users' privacy and audience concerns that inform the design of social networkbased wellness applications. Participants did not want all of their entries to be shared with all their Facebook friends, both because they did not want others to know some things and because they did not want to clutter others' newsfeeds. Users found it compelling, however, to interact with their friends around some "Good Things" they had posted.

Exploring Goal-setting, Rewards, Self-monitoring, and Sharing to Motivate Physical Activity

“…In a 16-week Internet-mediated walking program, subjects with access to a discussion board had a 13% higher retention rate compared to a group without this feature; however, daily step count was not affected [27,28]. [15,23,24,30]. While previous work has argued for the potential benefits of integrating wellness activities into social network sites, it has also identified several obstacles and challenges.…”

Motivating participation in social computing applications: a user modeling perspective

“…reminders, visualizations, personal agent's interventions) used by persuasion applications typically address the user in isolation, based on predicted by the theory reaction of the user according to the specific theory on which the approach is based. Recently, however, persuasion researchers have started to include the user's friends and family as actors in the motivational interventions (Lin et al 2006;Khaled et al 2006) and generally have sought to engage the user's social network as a source of persuasion (Munson et al 2010). This can be seen as a trend towards convergence with the area of incentive mechanism design for communities.…”

Pervasive, Persuasive Health: Some Challenges

“…In my own work (e.g., [12,13]), I have focused largely on systems that people might use indefinitely, potentially for the rest of their lives. In doing so, I have focused on making applications that are simple and fast to use, so that people would have an easier time starting and continuing to use them.…”