Personalizing Behaviour Change in mHealth Apps Through Virtual Reality: The MoveUp VR Edition Approach

Personalization is an important factor to increase the user experience (UX) and effectiveness of mHealth solutions. An interesting challenge is to maximize the acceptance level by target users to overcome traditional barriers in using this kind of applications, like sedentary lifestyle, psychological difficulties to make outdoor physical activity, labour issues, and so on. Virtual reality can be profitably exploited in such situations: virtual environments can be created based on user characteristics in order to improve his/her opportunity to accomplish prescribed amount of physical activity. This topic is the main subject of the paper, where the extension of an existing mHealth app based on this idea is presented.