Evaluating the Impact of Adaptive Personalized Goal Setting on Engagement Levels of Government Staff With a Gamified mHealth Tool: Results From a 2-Month Randomized Controlled Trial

Background: Although the health benefits of physical activity are well established, it remains challenging for people to adopt a more active lifestyle. mHealth interventions can be effective tools to promote physical activity and reduce sedentary behavior. Promising results have been obtained by using gamification techniques as behavior change strategies, especially when they were tailored towards an individual's preferences and goals. Yet, it remains unclear how goals are most effectively tailored in a gamified health promotion context. Objective: In this study, we evaluate the impact of personalized goal setting in the context of gamified mHealth interventions. We hypothesized that interventions that suggest health goals tailored towards users’ own self-perceived capabilities and preferences will be more engaging than interventions with generic goals. Methods: The study was designed as a two-arm randomized intervention trial. Participants were recruited among staff members of seven governmental organizations. They participated in an 8-week digital health promotion campaign that was especially designed to promote walks, bike rides and sports sessions. Using an mHealth application, participants could track their performance on two social leaderboards: a leaderboard displaying the individual scores of participants, and a leaderboard displaying the average scores per organizational department. Participants could score points by performing any of the six healthy tasks they got assigned (e.g., walk for at least 2000 m). The level of complexity of three tasks was updated every two weeks; either by changing the suggested task intensity, or the suggested frequency of the task. The two intervention arms—with participants randomly assigned—consisted of: 1) a personalized treatment that tailored the complexity parameters based on the self-perceived capabilities and self-selected goals of participants, and 2) a control treatment whe