Opening the black box of fitness tracking: understanding the mechanisms of feedback in motivating physical activity among older Singaporeans

This paper examines how older adults interact with fitness trackers and how that interaction influences their physical activity. We carried out qualitative interviews with 22 individuals between the ages of 55 and 72 who had used fitness trackers as part of a six-week field experiment investigating the effects of feedback from fitness trackers and the social influence of their spouses. From their comments, we derived an explorative process model explaining the mechanisms and the four stages of effects arising from personalised feedback, namely, cognitive, affective, conative, and intuitive. These effects were grouped into internal and external dimensions. Three types of goal-related decisions determined whether interviewees moved from the internal responses of cognition and emotion to the external response of behaviour change. The findings from this study elucidate how real-time personalised feedback can motivate physical activity among older adults and highlight the goal-related factors that influence this effect.