Why Users Comply with Wearables: The Role of Contextual Self-Efficacy in Behavioral Change
Annamina Rieder, U. Yeliz Eseryel, Christiane Lehrer, Reinhard Jung
Abstract
Wearables provide great opportunities for improving personal health, but research challenges their capacity to evoke behavioral change effectively. Realizing the full potential of wearables requires a better understanding of users’ behavior change processes. Based on self-efficacy theory, we investigate how wearables influence users’ perceptions of their self-efficacy and subsequent health behavior. Using narrative interviews with twenty-five long-term wearable users, we show that wearables can have both positive and negative effects on users’ perceptions of their self-efficacy and that these perceptions are subject to internal and external contexts, which can positively or negatively affect users’ compliance. We also find that the internal context may have a compounding or neutralizing effect on self-efficacy, despite an adverse external context. Our study shows the contextual and transient nature of self-efficacy, thus contributing to self-efficacy theory and research on wearables and offering practical design implications.