Persuasive Mobile Systems Design to Help People be Physically Active

This PhD thesis puts forward the results of research activities I have carried out at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Cagliari since March 2011. My work can be placed in the general field of Human-Computer Interaction and, more precisely, in the relative new and trending area of Persuasive Computing. Broadly speaking, a persuasive system is a system designed to change some habits or behaviors of the users by means of persuasion. My research activity sets out to address fundamental questions related to the application of mobile persuasive technologies to real-life problems, including: Are mobile technologies able to persuade people to a more physically active lifestyle? Are currently available systems actually effective? How can user experience design be improved in this class of softwares? How can human to device interaction be improved to favor users during their physical activities? Are these systems really effective over long time periods? The research activity this thesis presents, aimed at answering at previous questions through the study of the effects of mobile persuasive systems designed to foster people to a more active lifestyle. In literature, we can find many examples of prototypal persuasive mobile system. The results they reported are encouraging but, almost always, they are deducted from qualitative studies over short periods of time. This work endeavors to overcome these limitations through the development of a real world complex software platform designed to encourage people to a more active lifestyle. Users interact with the platform mainly through two Android-based applications freely available on the market. Thanks to our platform, our experimentations can rely on a conspicuous base of real users and a huge amount of automatically recorded statistics for potentially unlimited periods of time.