Designing Culture-based Persuasive Technology to Promote Physical Activity among University Students

Overweight and obesity are taking a huge toll on nations' financial and health resources annually. Student populations are at risk due to their sedentary lifestyles and the high demands of academic scholarship, leaving them with little or no time to exercise. Recently, persuasive technology, promoting physical activity, has been proposed. However, the traditional "one-size-fits-all" approach has not been effective among the student population. This calls for a newer and more effective approach, which leverages the available recreational and technological resources in the university at personal, social and cultural levels. In an effort to address students' sedentary behaviors, I aim to combine user behavior models, persuasive technology design and cultural strategies from Health Sciences for a more personalized and effective intervention. This paper presents the approach and the preliminary results of two user studies among 218 and 292 subjects from a Canadian and a Nigerian university respectively.