Paper review – The Power of Mobile Notifications to Increase Wellbeing

This paper is a research into how mobile notifications can increase wellbeing logging behaviour. It starts with emphasising self-logging as a solution for wellbeing. A straightforward example in the paper is of obesity; in the US, over one third of the population is obese; a mobile application which is regularly logged into can help raise self-awareness about wellbeing.

Then the author explains how given enough data they can provide users with feedback such as “You gain weight on Sundays”, “You eat more on days when you walk less” or “You are happier on days when its colder”.

While acknowledging that a lot of information for such feedback can be acquired automatically, the author highlights the need of self-logging to obtain data such as food intake, pain levels and mood. Naturally, users lack discipline to self-log and hence the motivation for this paper.

The paper then talks about related work that has been done in this area and proved unsuccessful as it required users to enter thorough details (e.g. amount of calories) about their intake. Users also reported disliking the disruptive nature of SMS as a reminder to log.

By reviewing user feedback about related work done in this field the authors created a very simple mobile app which made use of a FitBit to log step count and sleep as well as a WiThings Wi-Fi scale to log user’s weight. Calendar data and location was automatically captured and user could manually log food intake each day. To give users more flexibility they could choose things such as the time and frequency at which they should be asked to log their food intake; and the notification was non-interrupting as it would not ring or vibrate but instead just put a small icon in the notification tray.

The widget for inputting food intake is over-simplified; it consists of 3 questions, “How much did you eat today?”, “How healthy was the food you ate?” and “Did you prepare most of your food at home, or did you eat out?”. The user provided answers to this by means of a slide bar. Therefore the application is simplified at the cost of accuracy.

Their findings were quite positive and showed a 5 times increase in self-logging with 55-65% users consistently logging throughout the course of the study (one month). The user feedback was quite affirmative and users in general liked the polite reminders.

In conclusion the paper shows that users are more likely to self-log if Mobile Phone notifications are not disruptive and time and frequency of notifications was user configurable.