Sedentary behavior is causing plenty of health risks in today’s digital society. Studies have shownthat very little physical exercise is actually needed to counteract many of these health risks. Merelystanding up regularly and doing some mild exercise by your desk can be enough. Inspired by this,several approaches are being developed based on the idea of scheduling short pauses for physicalexercise, some of which use gamification, some do not. Gamification is thought to improve users’motivation towards an activity. One program that uses gamification to motivate its users to engagein physical exercise is Liopep. In this study, Liopep is compared to Pausit, which does not utilizegamification but is also a program designed for similar physical exercise. Pausit is a program thatguides the user through scheduled short exercise-breaks. Liopep on the other hand is an exergamebased on using a web-camera to track the users movements. Both programs are pause programs thathave scheduled sessions where the user uses the program. Comparing these two may lead to insightregarding the effect gamification has on pause programs. To perform this comparison a two-weekexperimental case-study was performed where participants were asked to use the two programs anddocument their experiences. At the end of each week the participants filled in a review of theprogram they had used during the week, including an Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI)questionnaire to measure motivation, interest, engagement and other aspects that may affectmotivation. After the participants had tested both programs they were interviewed for the purpose ofdocumenting their qualitative opinions and experiences as well as let the participants recommendimprovements for the programs. The results showed that the participants preferred the non-gamifiedprogram Pausit over the exergame Liopep. The issue appeared to be mainly due to drawbacks in thedesign and implementation of Liopep. Participants reported lower motivation and interest forLiopep than Pausit. Liopep was also percieved as promoting less “useful” or less healthy movementwhen compared to Pausit. Whether this is because of Liopep’s design or if it is an intrinsic issuewith gamification of pause programs cannot be confirmed. The theory of gamification claims thatthe implementation of game elements can increase users’ motivation, enjoyment end engagementwith an activity. This study did not show any of these effects when comparing Liopep with Pausit.However, the study’s results are inconclusive due to the small size of the sample. The study didproduce a list of suggested improvements for Liopep that address the issues that caused lowermotivation, enjoyment and engagement.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:liu-181135 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Ragnemalm, Teodor |
| Publisher | Linköpings universitet, Institutionen för datavetenskap |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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