What Are the Motives for Physical Activity in Younger and Older People Who Use Activity Trackers?

Activity levels can become quite low, especially in older adulthood. Activity trackers are one way of counteracting this trend and motivating people to lead a healthy, active lifestyle. This study investigated to what extent the motives for physical activity differ between younger and older adults who use activity trackers. For this purpose, 337 adults (younger: 27 +/- 4.2 years, older: 62 +/- 6.6 years, 58% women) participated in an online survey. They rated their agreement with four main motives for physical activity when using an activity tracker (social support, acquisition of knowledge about self-optimization, health maintenance and prevention, gamification). Contrary to the hypotheses, older people did not show significantly stronger agreement with the social support motives than younger adults. When developing activity tracking technologies for older adults, it may thus be a good idea to adapt data-recording to the more health-related needs of this age group, as maintaining health emerged as their most significant motive.