Using technology to enhance and encourage dance-based exercise

Abstract

This study investigated the role of Self-Service Technologies (SSTs) in dance-based exercise in order to begin exploring the motivations behind the use (or not) of SSTs by ordinary men and women in this context. The research approach employed interviews to gain insights into participants' use of SSTs and their exercise practices, in order to start establishing ways in which dance can be re/incorporated into people's lives through the design of appropriate SSTs. Findings from this study highlight the significant opportunity to further explore how the properties of music and dance can be integrated into the design of new SSTs. Literature suggests dance could be a beneficial exercise format for many people and self-service technology abounds for exercise but is often not used consistently. Our interviews asked participants about dance-based exercise and SSTs for exercise and showed that there is an opportunity to design SSTs to help people access dance-based exercise. SSTs should help people learn dance, build confidence, and dance alone or with others. SSTs could facilitate movement and increase engagement with physical activity whilst addressing issues around logistics, confidence and dance knowledge and experience.

Experiential Value of Technologies: A Qualitative Study with Older Adults

“…The person using a technology goes through a variety of experiences such as emotional, physical, and cognitive, depending on the human systems that the technology affects. These experiences will determine whether a person continues to engage with a product, disengage (by cancelling activities associated with the technology), or reengage [ 16 ]. For example, a person could stop exercising after negative incidents with their personal activity tracker.…”

Using technology to enhance and encourage dance-based exercise

“…This section has provided some consideration for the focus of this research, which is to explore how we can increase engagement with SSTs to increase individual's levels of physical activity. Dance has enormous potential for facilitating movement as it embodies many of the properties that facilitate effective engagement e including minimal skill requirements coupled with opportunities for mastery of skill (Flores, 1995), self-regulation of activity and autonomy (Ryan et al, 2009;Domene et al, 2016), social interaction (Keyani et al, 2005), and enjoyment or fun (Domene et al, 2014;Flores, 1995). For these reasons, dance has received some interest in the research community for its potential to engage individuals in physical activity (Domene et al, 2014(Domene et al, , 2016.…”

“…In efforts to address these problems and re-engage people with physical activity, an increasing number of self-service technologies (SSTs) have been developed. SSTs are services that the customer generates and interacts with in replacement of a traditional face-to-face service (Curran and Meuter, 2005). Popular SSTs for fitness include apps for mobile devices and wearable devices such as Fitbit, Garmin, Apple Watch, and Polar heart rate monitors.…”

“…Although the potential benefit of SSTs for fitness is large, they often fail to achieve their aims. The effectiveness of fitness trackers has been found to be dependent on the goals set by users and their motivation to engage with the device and associated website or application (Wang, 2014;Delgado, 2014). However, apps are a crowded market, many are not downloaded, and others are downloaded and abandoned after only a short period; according to a global study of more than 300 mobile apps and 300 million user profiles, only 25% of apps in all categories are used again after the first day and fewer than 10% continue use beyond seven days.…”

Mood induction through imitation of full‐body movements with different affective intentions

“…In addition, this project aims to explore a pertinent research question from the domain of human–machine interaction (more specifically, human–avatar interaction) which regards the usefulness of different visual presentations as ‘teachers’ or models to imitate such full‐body movements from. The question of whether it makes a difference to human observers when imitating a human avatar or a robot avatar teaching these movements still requires further research (for first assessments of this question, see Blackler et al, 2019). Some research has found that dynamic facial expressions of emotions, for example, can elicit similar reactions in humans when performed by humans and human‐like avatars (Johnson et al, 2018; Kegel et al, 2020; Moser et al, 2007).…”