The Point-of-Choice Prompt or the Always-On Progress Bar?: A Pilot Study of Reminders for Prolonged Sedentary Behavior Change

Published in Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2019

Abstract:
Prolonged sedentary behavior contributes to many chronic diseases. An appropriate reminder could help screen-based workers to reduce their prolonged sedentary behavior. The fixed-duration point-of-choice prompt has been frequently used in related work. However, this prompting system has several drawbacks. In this paper, we propose the SedentaryBar, a context-aware reminding system using an always-on progress bar to show the duration of a working session, as an alternative to the prompt. The new reminding system uses both users’ keyboard/mouse events on the computer and the state-of-the-art computer vision algorithm with the webcam to detect users’ presence, which makes the system more accurate and intelligent. Our evaluation study compared the SedentaryBar and the prompt using subjective and objective measurements. After using each method for a week respectively, more participants preferred the SedentaryBar. The participants’ perceived interruption and usefulness also suggested the SedentaryBar was more popular during the study. However, the logged data of the participants’ working durations indicated the prompt was more effective in reducing their sedentary behavior.

Recommended citation:
Yunlong Wang and Harald Reiterer: The Point-of-Choice Prompt or the Always-On Progress Bar?: A Pilot Study of Reminders for Prolonged Sedentary Behavior Change. In Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2019. DOI:10.1145/3290607.3313050