Purpose: Mobile health (mHealth) tools provide a variety of technical opportunities for supporting health behavior change. Intended changes can range from becoming more physically active (PA) to making healthier dietary choices. mHealth tools are rapidly getting better for data collection and intervention personalization. However, multiple studies have reported that mHealth users’ engagement still diminishes over time. This harms both monitoring capabilities as well as intervention reach. Engagement with mHealth and health-related goals is influenced by various variables. Environmental variables have well-documented beneficial effects on physical activity and positive emotions, but the extent users’ natural environment has beneficial effects on mHealth engagement levels with health-related goals has received limited attention. To this end, this study explores how environmental factors influence mHealth users’ engagement levels in everyday settings.
Methods: We apply the wearable experience sampling method (wESM) to collect self-reported and sensor data for a period of seven consecutive weeks. Participants (N = 60) receive personalized PA goals at the start and are asked, by small surveys, to self-report their momentary behavior via wearable devices (i.e., smartwatches) multiple times per day, using wESM platform called Experiencer. Different subgroups will receive different types of environmental clues showing the aggregate intervention data to study participants. The wESM prompts include questions concerning in-situ environmental characteristics and their momentary emotions. Through compliance with the wESM design, engagement is measured. Via the embedded sensor of the wearable (i.e., accelerometer) which collects physiological data passively, we measure whether or not the PA goals are met. Taking into account the longitudinal nature of ESM, the self-reported data on environmental factors is analyzed using a mixed modeling approach, adjusting for individual effects.
Results: The results will indicate the beneficial effects and patterns of environmental factors on engagement levels with mHealth behavior change interventions.
Conclusions: This study underscores the pivotal role of everyday environments in motivating health behavior change. As context-sensing technology advances, there is an opportunity to improve health behavior change strategies to personalize interventions based on environmental cues. As part of future research, researchers will aim to refine mHealth strategies for context-sensitive (w)ESMs and develop mechanisms to adapt interventions to diverse environmental contexts.

Purpose:
Previous research indicated that social contact during activities had a positive effect on well-being, as well as emphasized the importance of social contact in promoting calmness during physical activity (Bollenbach et al., 2022; Schwanen & Wang, 2014). The influence of social contact on physical behavior in real life and real-time has not yet been studied in detail. This ambulatory assessment study examines the psychosocial layers within the socio-ecological framework in considering whether the social context (e.g., family, friends) influences the subsequent physical behavior and moderates the association between within-subject affective well-being and physical behavior.
Methods:
We recruited a sample of 64 employees during the period from July 2021 to March 2022. The assessment took place over a minimum of five consecutive days. Utilizing ambulatory assessment, participants completed e-diaries about their affective well-being up to six times a day, and their physical behavior was simultaneously recorded via accelerometers at two different positions (i.e., hip and thigh). The participants answered e-diary prompts about their current social environments. The first item asks participants who they are currently surrounded by (i.e., partner, family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, strangers, others, nobody), while the second item assessed whether the participant would prefer to be alone or with company, and whether they find being with their current social group pleasant or not.
Results:
We will conduct multilevel models to examine momentary within-person effects of affective well-being on subsequent physical behavior outcomes. We will add the social contact parameters alone and not alone to our main model as time-variant predictors. In addition, we conducted exploratory analyses for physical activity and sedentary behavior combining interactions between affective well-being and social contact parameters. In these preliminary exploratory analyses, we have found that social context significantly moderated the relationship between valence and physical activity. Furthermore, we observed that the influence of family and friends moderated the association between calmness and physical activity.
Conclusions:
Future interventions should include peer relationship-building activities to promote a supportive environment that encourages physical activity and helps individuals overcome barriers to being active. The psychosocial layer reveals as another factor in promoting and maintaining an individual's active lifestyle.

Purpose:
Social media is a promising tool for promoting physical activity (PA) among college women, who engage in less PA than men and frequently use these platforms. “Fitness influencer” content includes free PA advice and motivation which could be helpful, but it is unclear if these benefits outweigh potential issues like unhealthy social comparisons and misinformation. Thus, research is needed to determine how helpful, motivating, and trustworthy fitness influencers and their content are for promoting PA among college women, providing insights for intervention development.
Methods:
Women college students (N=12; aged 18 to 24) were eligible if interested in increasing PA, did not meet PA recommendations, and used social media. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to understand their current consumption of, interest in, and perceptions of influencer or fitness content social media, including reactions to real social media posts targeting young adults. Interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using an emerging themes approach.
Results:
In interviews with college women (Mage=20.7±1.5), participants emphasized the importance of influencers portraying transparency, authenticity, and relatability in representing themselves, their lives, their exercise, and product promotions. However, they also recognized some can be “disingenuous” or manipulate their content. Participants preferred influencer content with realistic, non-idealized, or body types similar to those of the participants. Although educational credentials were considered important in identifying trustworthiness or content quality (i.e., misinformation), this was less crucial as influencers are seen as credible due to their practical PA experience. Further, participants acknowledged the motivational and inspirational impact of influencers and their fitness content. However, they noted that their own emotional response and tendency to be motivated by it depended on whether they were experiencing body dissatisfaction or "feeling down on themselves”.
Conclusions:
Interview findings provide insight into preferred content and influencer characteristics that may effectively motivate and impact PA in college women. Study results will be used to develop a social media-based intervention that aims to provide college women with tools to navigate PA content in identifying helpful and accurate content while avoiding possibly demotivating and unsupportive content.