A Smartphone App to Improve Physical Activity

This PA tracker app auto-monitors PA and provides a text-based summary of goal progress, thereby targeting self-regulation and outcome expectation.

On Your Feet is a specialty app feature designed to be paired with a PA tracker app and reduce sedentary activity-a health risk factor largely independent of insufficient PA. This feature utilizes self-regulatory and behavior change techniques including goal-setting, progress feedback, and prompting. Accumulated sedentary activity time is displayed alongside self-selected goals; reminders to stand are sent at a user-specified frequency; and general tips and previously compiled, older adult-identified strategies to reduce sedentary activity are texted. Additionally, messages about the benefits of reducing sedentary activity and overcoming barriers are sent.

Coach Me is a specialty app feature designed to be paired with a PA tracker app and includes daily messages that assist older adults in discovering practical ways to integrate PA into their daily routines and overcoming PA barriers. Blending PA with productive activity facilitates PA engagement in older adults. In Coach Me, suggestions on how to intensify daily activities are tailored based on user selections from an activity inventory. This app feature helps older adults become more active in a minimally intrusive way, while allowing for engagement in productive and meaningful activities. Coach Me asks users to select obstacles to PA encountered in the previous week. Based on those selections, the app sends strategies on how to overcome those barriers, thereby targeting self-efficacy.

"Proof Positive is a specialty app feature designed to be paired with a PA tracker app and capitalizes on the beneficial effects that exposure to positive aging messages and stereotypes has on health and PA. When activated, users (a) receive texts describing how old age does not equate to physical inability, (b) obtain information about the benefits of growing older, and (c) are presented with a weekly positive aging stereotype task modeled after a computerized series. This last function exposes users to blocks of positive priming words. Primers are quickly flashed to allow perception without awareness while users focus on a simple icon that represents PA. Icons are intended to provide an additional PA cue, maintain user interest, and increase the external validity."