Implementing and Evaluating a Virtual Fitness Trainer System for Improving Work Productivity

Physical fitness is the key to the health and well-being of individuals and affects not only their daily lifestyles but also their occupational effectiveness. Being fit and healthy means that a person has more stamina and is in better condition to work on tough, physically demanding jobs for long periods, thus it plays a crucial role in improving individuals’ productivity at work. Unfortunately, employees often lack the motivation to participate in on-site physical activities because of the absence of “cues to action” in traditional health promotion programs.According to the Health Belief Model, Self-determination Theory and the Theory of Planned Behavior, “cues to action” serve as triggers that stimulate individuals’ motivation to participate in health behavior (e.g., fitness activity). The presence of influential cues triggers individuals’ motivation to move from extrinsically oriented health attitude/belief to intrinsically oriented competence (i.e., self-efficacy) to form a self-determined motivation that directly determines actual participation in activities and perceptions of enjoyment.This project uses the Design Science approach to develop and evaluate a virtual fitness trainer system that is able to offer influential “cues to action” to stimulate individuals’ self-determined motivation and impact their participation in health behavior in the form of three to four minutes of office-based fitness activity per day, in order to contribute to improvement in their productivity at work.The proposed virtual fitness training system, which follows the “computers as social actors” paradigm, favors human-like factors which are missing from existing systems. Specifically, our design attributes are embodied in the virtual trainer avatar’s appearance and its reminding style. Drawing upon Similarity-attraction Theory and the leadership literature, we propose that the more similarity there is between the virtual trainer avatar’s appearance and individuals’ preference and the more transformational the communication style adopted by the trainer, the more self motivated the individual will be and the more likely they will be to participate and persist in suggested fitness activity. By promoting employees’ motivation, this virtual trainer system is expected to contribute to the well being of employees and their employers regarding work productivity improvement.To evaluate the proposed virtual trainer system, this project adopts a longitudinal field experiment along with survey, interview, and observation. The results are expected to validate the appropriateness of our design’s attributes, contributing to human-computer interaction research and practices, and validate the appropriateness for organizations of adopting a virtual training system for fitness enhancement, contributing to human resources management and health management research and practices.