ABSTRACT

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.

摘要

可穿戴设备为改善个人健康提供了巨大的机会，但研究挑战了它们有效引发行为改变的能力。要实现可穿戴设备的全部潜能，需要对用户的行为改变过程有更好的了解。基于自我效能感理论，我们研究了可穿戴设备如何影响用户对其自我效能感和随后的健康行为的看法。通过对25个长期可穿戴用户的叙述性访谈，我们发现可穿戴设备可以对用户的自我效能感产生积极和消极的影响，并且这些感知受内部和外部环境的影响，这些环境可以正面或负面地影响影响用户的合规性。我们还发现，尽管外部环境不利，但内部环境可能会对自我效能产生复合或中和作用。