The Role of Three Forms of Self-Efficacy in Improving Longitudinal Health Performance: Designing a Quantified-Self 2.0 Health Community with a Motivational Affordance Perspective

Abstract

With the rapid development of wearable technologies, nowadays people can easily track and record their health-related information, such as athletic performance and vital signs. The quantified-self 2.0 movement encourages wearable device users to share their health information with other online community members to ensure the sustainable use of wearable technologies and the maintenance of health behavior. However, the health literature claims that health behavior maintenance is difficult because it is easy for people to give up on the health behavior during the maintenance stage, considering the unforeseen barriers and temptations that may occur in the long term. Drawing upon a motivational affordance perspective and the theory of health action process approach (HAPA), this theoretical essay provides design principles for quantified-self 2.0 platforms, with the purpose to increase users’ longitudinal health performance. Additionally, we propose a conceptual model explaining the underlying mechanism in terms of how these affordance design principles serve as the sources of three specific kinds of self-efficacy in this context (i.e., pre-action, maintenance, and recovery self-efficacy), which play crucial roles in health behavior maintenance.

Keywords: wearable device, quantified-self 2.0 platforms, health behavior maintenance, motivational affordance, self-efficacy