Integrating person-to-person social support in smartphone apps for promoting physical activity

The epidemic of physical inactivity is a major health hazard in the modern society, therefore creating effective and innovative health programs and interventions is important. This paper presents a novel approach in which person-to-person social support is incorporated in mHealth interventions for increasing physical activity. Social support is already used as a behaviour change technique in mHealth apps for influencing physical activity, but mostly offered virtually. While virtually-offered social support is efficient, we believe that person-to-person communication, based on personal coaching, might open a new way of influencing the inactive users and their motivation. Responding to this, we developed an Android application that facilitates physically inactive users to connect with a real life coach to receive person-to-person social support. This paper explains the motivation behind the system’s design decisions and discusses the potential of social support in mHeatlh apps. In addition, we present the design of the evaluation study in which the hypotheses and research questions will be evaluated.