Supporting Physical Activity at Home with Interactive Contextual Cues
Supporting Physical Activity at Home with Interactive Contextual Cues
Add movement to your everyday routine with interactive smart cues.
Using interactive “smart cues” placed around the house to make physical activity a part of your daily routine
Why this matters
Physical activity improves wellbeing and even small bouts of exercise can make a difference. However, people struggle to find time and remember to move at home – and without consistent repetition it is difficult to develop long-lasting habits.
The challenge
Starting a new habit is hard, but a consistent environment and its elements can help to prompt the behaviour and make it automatic. Technology could help, but existing home technologies have been used for home monitoring and control, with limited focus on situated habit formation.
Our approach
Our goal is to take advantage of the important role the environment plays in supporting habit formation. To do so, we use small interactive devices placed around the house (“smart cues”) to prompt the users and help them integrate movement into daily tasks.
Theoretical background
As our goal is to support behaviour change and encourage regular physical activity as part of everyday routines, this project is grounded in habit formation research.
Elements of habit formation
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- Repetition: To become automatic, the target behaviour has be consistently repeated. But repetition alone is not enough.
- Stable environment: To ensure the repetition leads to a habit, the behaviour should be repeated in a stable environment to help form associations that will trigger user’s desired actions.
- Contextual cues: Objects and existing routines associated with the environment serve as triggers to actions and are necessary for the formation of a habit.
UK Research and Innovation
