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The Effect of Physical Activity Interventions Comprising Wearables and Smartphone Applications on Physical Activity: a Systematic Review and Meta-analysis
Open accessAbstract
BACKGROUND: Worldwide physical activity levels of adults are declining, which is associated with increased chronic disease risk. Wearables and smartphone applications offer new opportunities to change physical activity behaviour. This systematic review summarizes the evidence regarding the effect of wearables and smartphone applications on promoting physical activity. METHODS: PubMed, EMBASE and Cochrane databases were searched for RCTs, published since January 2008, on wearables and smartphone applications to promote physical activity. Studies were excluded when the study population consisted of children or adolescents, the intervention did not promote physical activity or comprised a minor part of the intervention, or the intervention was Internet-based and not accessible by smartphone. Risk of bias was assessed by the Cochrane collaboration tool. The primary outcome was changed in physical activity level. Meta-analyses were performed to assess the pooled effect on (moderate-to-vigorous) physical activity in minutes per day and daily step count. RESULTS: = 90%). When removing studies with an unclear or high risk of bias, intervention effects improved and statistical heterogeneity was removed. CONCLUSIONS: This meta-analysis showed a small to moderate effect of physical activity interventions comprising wearables and smartphone applications on physical activity. Hence, wearables and smartphone applications are likely to bring new opportunities in delivering tailored interventions to increase levels of physical activity.
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“The quality of the trials was independently evaluated by 2 authors using the Cochrane Collaboration tool [67] to assess the risk of bias.”
From Conversational Agent Interventions for Mental Health Problems: Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials (2023) · cites this paper as [67]
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“These results are in line with prior reviews on wearables that showed no change in sedentary behaviors [16], and an improvement in PA outcomes [16-18,28,30-32,35,36,107] and weight loss [28,32,35,108].”
From Fitbit-based interventions for healthy lifestyle outcomes: systematic review and meta-analysis (2020) · cites this paper as [31]
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Metadata
- Authors
- Gal, R., May, A. M., van Overmeeren, E. J., Simons, M., & Monninkhof, E. M.
- Affiliations
- Utrecht University (NL)
- Corresponding author
- Gal, Roxanne
- Venue
- Sports Medicine - Open
- Published
- 2018-09-03
- Volume
- 4
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 42-42
- ISSN
- 2198-9761 (ISSN-L)
- 2199-1170
- PMC
- PMC6120856
- OpenAlex
- W2889406366
- Cited by
- 257
- References
- 62
- Citations by year
- 2026: 23 · 2025: 18 · 2024: 30 · 2023: 34 · 2022: 56 · 2021: 44 · 2020: 33 · 2019: 16 · 2018: 2
- FWCI
- 3.12
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Sports Medicine - Open (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Socio-Environmental Systems Modeling (acceptedVersion, cc-by)
- Leiden Repository (Leiden University) (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Utrecht University Repository (Utrecht University) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- Sport & Society, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
- ZonMw (016.156.050)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health › Physical Activity and Health
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › General Health Professions › Mobile Health and mHealth Applications
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Context-Aware Activity Recognition Systems
- Keywords
- physical activity interventions, wearable devices, mobile application, physical activity promotion, moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, daily step count, behavior change, risk of bias
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