Supporting Action Planning for Sedentary Behavior Change by Visualizing Personal Mobility Patterns on Smartphone

Scientific evidence has shown that long-term sedentary behaviour is detrimental to human health. Therefore, a trend appears in the field of healthy lifestyle promotion that more attention is drawn to sedentary behaviour rather than only physical activity. However, technology-based mobile health intervention tools targeting reducing sedentary behaviour are still lacking. This paper aims to explore a solution for sedentary behaviour change through supporting action planning. Action planning can not only bridge the intention-behavior gap in controlled motivation processes, but also enforce the cue-behavior association in unconscious processes. We present a smartphone-based personal mobility pattern visualization, with which we expect the users can make better action plans. The interactive visualization integrates temporal and spatial patterns of personal sedentary and walking behaviour, to provide explicit hints on when, where, and how to reduce sedentary behaviour and increase daily steps. We also present our experimental design to evaluate the visualization- based intervention tool.