Towards a Mobile Application to Create Sedentary Awareness

Prolonged sitting time is a potential health risk, not only for people with an inactive lifestyle, but also for those who do meet the recommended amount of physical activity. In this paper, we evaluate SitCoach, a mobile application to nudge people from their seats. The application is targeted to office workers. SitCoach monitors physical activity and sedentary behavior to provide timely feedback by means of suggesting sitting breaks. A pilot experiment with a group of 8 users learned that the general awareness of the importance of sitting breaks is low. Combined with the belief that the ability to take sitting breaks is highly dependent on external factors, a strategy of proposing break reminders may not be the most successful for this target group. Future work should focus on raising awareness of the problem and providing insights into personal sitting behavior. Author