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Social Information as a Means to Enhance Engagement in Citizen Science‐Based Telerehabilitation
Author(s) -
Nakayama Shinnosuke,
Tolbert Tyrone J.,
Nov Oded,
Porfiri Maurizio
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
journal of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.903
H-Index - 145
eISSN - 2330-1643
pISSN - 2330-1635
DOI - 10.1002/asi.24147
Subject(s) - telerehabilitation , citizen science , context (archaeology) , computer science , diversity (politics) , user engagement , human–computer interaction , psychology , world wide web , internet privacy , health care , sociology , telemedicine , political science , paleontology , botany , anthropology , law , biology
Advancements in computer‐mediated exercise put forward the feasibility of telerehabilitation, but it remains a challenge to retain patients' engagement in exercises. Building on our previous study demonstrating enhanced engagement in citizen science through social information about others' contributions, we propose a novel framework for effective telerehabilitation that integrates citizen science and social information into physical exercise. We hypothesized that social information about others' contributions would augment engagement in physical activity by encouraging people to invest more effort toward discovery of novel information in a citizen science context. We recruited healthy participants to monitor the environment of a polluted canal by tagging images using a haptic device toward gathering environmental information. Along with the images, we displayed the locations of the tags created by the previous participants. We found that participants increased both the amount and duration of physical activity when presented with a larger number of the previous tags. Further, they increased the diversity of tagged objects by avoiding the locations tagged by the previous participants, thereby generating richer information about the environment. Our results suggest that social information is a viable means to augment engagement in rehabilitation exercise by incentivizing the contribution to scientific activities.