HabitAR: Motivating outdoor walk with animal-watching

Outdoor exercise has been indicated to have physical and mental benefits over indoor exercise and tends to take place in more engaging and attractive settings. Increasing motivation is a critical factor in behavior change. We envision that the interaction between users’ walking data and components of their walking environment can be a potential method to motivate physical activity and offer novel opportunities. In this study, we introduce HabitAR, a blog-community-based application connecting the walk experience with the animal watching activities that provide different routes in which the types of animals that can be watched are proportional to walking distance. Following the research-through-design approach, we explored how this concept works on users’ motivation by building an emotional connection between users and animals with social blogging. We present the results of the pilot study and the insights gained from this study.