• Korean Journal of Childcare and Education
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.75-99
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• 2022

Objective: This study aims to explore ways to empirically analyze and manage childcare teachers' job stress based on their relationship with stress-related physiological indicators measured by a fitness tracker. Methods: The study participants were 27 childcare teachers in Gyeonggi-do and wore Garmin's wearable fitness tracker Vivosmart 4 for 15 days for three months. The collected information was analyzed for mean, SD, ANOVA, and correlation using JAMOVI 2.00. Results: First, among the daily changes of physiological indicators measured by a fitness tracker, the data collected on Mondays were significant. On Mondays, the stress index was high, the duration of the rest period was short, and the sleep time was short. The stress of childcare teachers showed a significant negative relationship with the body battery which was calculated by considering the duration of the rest period, heart rate variability, stress, and activity level. Also, the duration of deep sleep was positively correlated with a low degree of stress. There was a significant relationship between the childcare teachers' psychological indicators and the biomarkers measured by fitness trackers. Conclusion/Implications: Stress research using a fitness tracker is big data, and in-depth analysis is possible. Fitness trackers can collect and utilize repeated measurement data for each individual childcare teacher.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.93-98
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• 2015

IoT (Internet of Things) is recently burgeoning as business applications as well as ICT itself. Among the business applications of IoT, wearable devices are recognized as a leading area of customer devices. This research first identifies customer needs of activity trackers (fitness trackers), as one of representative wearable devices, and mapping the identified needs with the well-known marketing model of marketing mix (4 P's: Product, Price, Promotion, and Place). Survey was applied to university students for identifying current and potential needs for activity trackers. The needs were classified by 4 P's, and according to the results, different from other IT devices, activity trackers has more potential needs. Moreover, reliable distribution channels, offline and company owned shops were preferred, rather than online shopping mall by third parties. The results would provide some valuable implications to not only designers of activity trackers but also business management.

• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.218-225
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• 2020

Purpose Wearable devices are widely used in our daily life. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between persuasive designs of fitness trackers and users' physical activity behavior. Methods To test the research model, data was collected from a web-based survey in China, resulting in an effective sample of 166 usable questionnaires. The survey was restricted only to respondents who wear a fitness tracker. Results The sample surveyed in this study indicated that half of the respondents had been wearing a smart fitness tracker shorter than one year, and only 27% were long-time users (longer than two years). Dialogue support and social support strategies were both proved to be effective in increasing users' workout behavior intention. Social support strategies had a greater effect on behavior change than dialogue support strategies. Conclusion The findings from this study make several contributions to the practice. Wearable devices developers can employ the result from this study to help them design devices, which can persuade people to do more exercises and preserve a healthier life.

• Research in Community and Public Health Nursing
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.257-270
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• 2019

Purpose: This study is designed as a non-equivalent, control group pre/post-test for identifying effectiveness of a workplace walking program using a fitness tracker including individual counseling and tailored text messaging. Methods: Seventy-nine employees from two large companies were allocated into an intervention group (n=39) and a control group (n=40). Participants were asked to wear a fitness tracker (Fitbit Charger HR) during 24-hour, 5-days per week, for 10 weeks. The intervention group was provided with daily walking steps measured by Fitbit, weekly counseling with a specifically designed workbook, and seven weekly text messaging, and the control group with the fitness tracker only. Results: At the week 10 measurement, there were significant differences between the intervention and control groups in physical activity self-efficacy (p<.001), physical activity behavior (p<.001), daily walking steps (p<.001), systolic blood pressure (p=.033), and wellness (p<.001). Conclusion: These results suggest that the workplace walking program using a fitness tracker including individual counseling and tailored text messaging is more effective for persons with 10,000 steps/day. Therefore, it is recommended to actively apply this workplace walking program to inactive employees for encouraging regular physical activities and improving their wellness.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.57-62
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• 2022

The recent past has seen a tremendous amount of advancement in the field of Internet of Things (IoT), allowing the influx of a variety of devices into the market. IoT devices are present in almost every aspect of our daily lives. While this increase in usage has many advantages, it also comes with many problems, including and not limited to, the problem of security. There is a need for better measures to be put in place to ensure that the users' data is protected. In particular, fitness trackers used by a vast number of people, transmit important data regarding the health and location of the user. This data is transmitted from the fitness device to the phone and from the phone onto a cloud server. The transmission from device to phone is done over Bluetooth and the latest version of Bluetooth Light Energy (BLE) is fairly advanced in terms of security, it is susceptible to attacks such as Man-in-the-Middle attack and Denial of Service attack. Additionally, the data must be stored in an encrypted form on the cloud server; however, this proves to be a problem when the data must be decrypted to use for running computations. In order to ensure protection of data, measures such as end-to-end encryption may be used. Homomorphic encryption is a class of encryption schemes that allow computations on encrypted data. This paper explores the application of homomorphic encryption for fitness trackers.

• Convergence Security Journal
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.63-68
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• 2016

This study examined the current state of fitness IT which are commercially available, and proposed the prospect and promoting plans for fitness IT. Latest wearable smart market has been reorganized into smart watch market and fitness tracker market. Fitness trackers which are typical devices of fitness IT technology has developed various types of such as watch, band, clothes, glasses, and lens. Until now, the most popular type of fitness tracker are watch and band including clip, necklace, hair band etc.. Also Apple and Google referred to as the two major axes of mobile platform has provided a health-related platform such as "Healthkit" and "Google Fit" for preoccupying the fitness business. The view of the fitness IT has seen a continuous growth trend considering smaller and lighter of fitness-related wearable device. To continuous growth and promote of fitness IT, it is expected to require mash-up a variety of fitness applications and services, ensuring the convenience of user experience, design and resonable price.

• International Journal of Knowledge Content Development & Technology
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.7-16
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• 2022

With the proliferation of activity-tracking devices and other smart tools, more users leverage these personal informatics technologies to track their physical and fitness-related activities. The research on the benefits (and limitations) of these devices tends to focus on the use of a single tool, leaving out the interactions among multiple technologies, and how these interactions influence the way users perceive their affordances. Building from an ecological perspective, I extend this research by providing insight into the competitive and complementary relationships among activity tracking devices and other fitness-related and personal informatics technologies within the device ecology of technologies around the user. The affordances of these devices are therefore not enacted in isolation but are relational to understanding of other technological options and differing personal preferences and goals of the user.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.201-224
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• 2020

Purpose The study focuses on the physical activity behavior change effect of smart wristband, which is the most popular type of fitness tracker nowadays. The purpose of the research is to investigate how people's workout behavior may change after wearing a smart band and examine what kind of role persuasive design plays in behavior change. Design/Methodology/Approach This research employed an experimental study to examine whether the user's workout behaviors changed after using wristband from the "Behavior Wizard" perspective. A representative smart wristband from a major vendor was selected as the objects of experimental study. In the experiment, by comparing users' workout behavior before and after using the wristband, behavior changes of all the experiment participants were classified into one of the 15 behavior change types. Users perceived persuasive design characteristics were measured and group differences were tested among different behavior change groups. Findings This research found that nearly half of the participants changed their workout behavior while half retained their workout status or no exercise status. Half of the participants who did not do exercise in their spare time started walking in the experiment. Results also showed that participants who started working out perceived higher levels of persuasive design devised into the smart band than participants who preserved no exercise status, except for facilitation and reward strategies. Participants who retained workout and those who increased workout frequency perceived no difference in smart band persuasive design.

• Journal of the HCI Society of Korea
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.23-30
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• 2016

The landscape of the current fitness trackers is not only limited to the aerobic exercises but also the weight training is comparatively excluded. Recently, a few weight training fitness tracker was released, human-computer interaction was not well designed due to the lack of considering the context. Because body movement would be intense while doing exercises, having exercise performers hold or operate a device makes a negative experience. As the wearable device is always inseparable to body, it could provide effective feedback because holding or operating a device is not necessary. Therefore, this study aims to make the exercise performers feel a natural feedback through the wearable device to do effective exercises. As a result, this study identified three findings. First, the information which exercise performers most needed was 'during exercise.' and the most necessary information for exercise performers through wearable device's sensory feedback was about 'pace control' with counting and motivation. Second, the order of the most preferred presentation type of sensory feedback was auditory feedback, haptic feedback and visual feedback. Third, the satisfaction, utility, usefulness score of sensory feedback as same as the personal trainer's feedback. In conclusion, this study illustrated the feedback design implications using a wearable device while doing weight training and the possibilities that wearable device could be substitute for personal trainer.