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

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.