Exploring Self-competition as a Viable Motivation to Promote Physical Activity

Persuasive systems design encompasses a wide range of concepts that may help users be motivated to achieve the targeted goal or behavior change. This study evaluates contemporary applications that seek to promote physical activity and finds that, although there are different implementations of competition-related features, they are not designed for individuals motivated by self-competition, a type of competition that allows individuals to compete against themselves to beat their own personal best performance. Furthermore, it explores how the psychological construct of competitive orientation can be used as a basis for personalizing persuasive systems. The paper then conceptualizes the design features of a system that addresses and caters to the self-competitive orientation of a user.