Steptacular: An incentive mechanism for promoting wellness

Author

Gomes, Naini ; Merugu, Deepak ; O´Brien, Gearoid ; Mandayam, Chinmoy ; Yue, Jia Shuo ; Atikoglu, Berk ; Albert, Adrian ; Fukumoto, Norihiro ; Liu, Huan ; Prabhakar, Balaji ; Wischik, Damon

Author_Institution

Stanford Univ., Stanford, CA, USA

fYear

2012

fDate

3-7 Jan. 2012

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

6

Abstract

This paper describes Steptacular, an online interactive incentive system for encouraging people to walk more. A trial offering Steptacular to the employees of Accenture-USA was conducted over a 6 month period. Over 5,000 employees registered for the program and close to 3,000 participants wore USB-enabled pedometers; from time to time they plugged their pedometer into a computer to upload hourly step counts to a website; and the website had a range of features to encourage more walking. These features included monetary rewards which were randomly redeemable through a simple game, and a social component. We describe the system and present preliminary findings about the effectiveness of each of these features in encouraging physical activity.

Keywords

Web sites; biomedical equipment; computer games; incentive schemes; medical computing; Accenture USA; Steptacular mechanism; USB-enabled pedometer; United States of America; Universal Serial Bus; Web site; interactive incentive system; monetary reward; physical activity; simple game; social component; wellness promotion; Diseases; Electronic mail; Games; Gold; Legged locomotion; Moon; Tiles;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Communication Systems and Networks (COMSNETS), 2012 Fourth International Conference on

Conference_Location

Bangalore

Print_ISBN

978-1-4673-0296-8

Electronic_ISBN

978-1-4673-0297-5

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/COMSNETS.2012.6151377

Filename

6151377