Annamina Rieder

Physical inactivity is a global public health problem that poses health risks to individuals and imposes financial burdens on already strained healthcare systems. Wearables that promote regular physical activity and a healthy diet bear great potential to meet these challenges and are increasingly integrated into the healthcare system. However, extant research shows ambivalent results regarding the effectiveness of wearables in improving users’ health behavior. Specifically important is understanding users’ systematic behavior change through wearables. Constructive digitalization of the healthcare system requires a deeper understanding of why some users change their behavior and others do not. Based on self-leadership theory and our analysis of narrative interviews with 50 long-term wearable users, we identify four wearable use patterns that bring about different behav- ioral outcomes: following, ignoring, combining, and self-leading. Our study contributes to self-leadership theory and research on individual health information systems and has practical implications for wearable and healthcare providers.

Wearables provide great opportunities for improving personal health, but research challenges their capacity to evoke behavioral change effectively. Realizing the full potential of wearables requires a better understanding of users’ behavior change processes. Based on self-efficacy theory, we investigate how wearables influence users’ perceptions of their self-efficacy and subsequent health behavior. Using narrative interviews with twenty-five long-term wearable users, we show that wearables can have both positive and negative effects on users’ perceptions of their self-efficacy and that these perceptions are subject to internal and external contexts, which can positively or negatively affect users’ compliance. We also find that the internal context may have a compounding or neutralizing effect on self-efficacy, despite an adverse external context. Our study shows the contextual and transient nature of self-efficacy, thus contributing to self-efficacy theory and research on wearables and offering practical design implications.

Digital Nudging can influence user behavior in the digital context by the targeted design of user interfaces. Based on behavioral economics, psychological effects can be utilized or counteracted to support users in decision-making. If applied systematically, digital nudging can enhance the user experience and add significant value to the business.

Residential heating is a major source of carbon emissions and, at the same time, represents a significant cost factor for households. Thus, reducing heating costs through sustainable heating behaviors is of great individual and societal interest. However, the consequences of heating behaviors are complex and delayed, so most people are unaware of them. To address this problem, we designed two loss aversion nudges, using (i) a cost salience and (ii) a health risk framing to induce more sustainable heating and ventilation behaviors. We evaluated them against a no-intervention control group in a field experiment at a major German real estate company. While the cost salience nudge was found to improve heating behaviors and became more effective over time, the health risk nudge did not show an effect. Finally, our findings have implications for research on nudging and loss aversion and for practitioners, namely housing providers and more generalized entities aiming to nudge for pro-environmental behaviors.