Digital nudging as a means to increase physical activity in older adults : A study examning the effects of digital nudging on the older generations

Abstract: The importance that physical movement holds for people’s health is not up for debate. Staying active can alleviate a lot of symptoms, both physical and mental, that occur in both young and old, due to a sedentary lifestyle or to aging. Because of the way the society is developing, more and more people suffer from a sedentary lifestyle. Among all age groups, the older people have an especially high risk for negative side effects of too much sedentary time. The World Health Organization encourages countries to help combat the sedentary lifestyles and motivate people to exercise more. In their efforts to make sure people across countries have access to health information they also encourage the development of digital health tools and the use of eHealth, which falls under the umbrella term digital health. To create the lifestyle changes needed to become and stay more physically active there can be a need for motivational factors such as triggers, reminders and other motivators. Persuasive design in general and nudges in particular have the function where they will nudge people towards making a behavior change without removing the autonomy of the person. As the older people in Sweden are generally both digital and eHealth literate and are able to handle health related matters such as booking appointments and reading their health journal online, we see a possibility to examine the area of nudging the older towards a behavior change that leads to increased physical activity. Thus, in this study we examine to what extent digital nudges impact physical activities and related conditions, we chose a within subject design experiment which had two conditions – with and without a mobile application that offers digital nudges during two weeks of time period. In our study the test subjects are people above 65 years old as this group of people would greatly benefit from more physical activity and the study of how digital nudges would affect the older population in Sweden is an understudied area. The participants in one of the groups were nudged, using nudges such as the position effects, social norm and framing effects. A dependent t test was conducted and depending on the alpha level used, there was a statistical significance shown. Overall the amount of physical activity in older adults having a prototype with nudges was significantly higher. The results for this study are relevant to some degree since this is not something that has been studied before.