Stepcity: a Preliminary Investigation of a Personal Informatics-Based Social Game on Behavior Change

Author/Creator ORCID

Date

2014-04

Department

Program

Citation of Original Publication

Walsh, G., & Golbeck, J. (2014, April). Stepcity: a Preliminary Investigation of a Personal Informatics-Based Social Game on Behavior Change. In CHI'14 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2371-2376). ACM.

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Abstract

Encouraging physical activity is an important public health issue. In this study, we set out to see if a game could be used to motivate people to be more active. We recruited 74 subjects to wear Fitbits – a personal activity monitoring device that tracked the number of steps taken in a day – and compared step totals in three experimental conditions: a control, a social interaction experience, and a social game we developed called StepCity. We found that for newer Fitbit users, the game led to users taking more steps than they did in a control condition. In this poster, we present the details of our system and the results of a controlled experiment.