The Adoption of Wearables for a Healthy Lifestyle: Can Gamification Help?

Wearables are a novel device category that promotes healthy lifestyles, providing consumers with unforeseen health monitoring capabilities. Gamification, on the other hand, is an intriguing phenomenon that seeks to motivate people by applying game design elements to non-gaming contexts like healthcare. While increasing literature is available on wearables in healthcare and gamification in healthcare, thus far, little attention has been paid to the combination of both concepts. In this paper we take a first step towards closing this gap by looking at how gamification of health apps can provide consumers with a motivating and enticing interaction concept to drive the adoption of wearables for a healthy lifestyle. Thereby, we apply a technological and consumer market lens and analyze rich data from 40 interviews and an online survey. Our results highlight that although people show high interest in wearables and gamification, their combined added value is still unknown among potential consumers. A practical contribution of this paper is that industry should make the functionality and relevance much more clear. Activity tracking and fitness & health functionality are perceived as most important by (potential) consumers.