A Study on Twitter Usage for Fitness Self-Reporting via Mobile Apps

The purpose of this study was to research the new emerging technology of mobile health, the use of mobile fitness apps to share one’s workout with their Twitter social network, the workout tweets and the individualities of the Tweeters. 70,748 tweets from mobile fitness application Endomondo were processed using an online tweet collection application and a customized JavaScript to determine aspects of the shared workouts and the demographics of those that share. The data shows that by tracking mobile fitness app hashtags, a wealth of information can be gathered to include but not limited to exercise frequency, daily use patterns, location based workouts and language characteristics. While a majority of these tweets are to share a specific workout with their Twitter social networking, the data would suggest other reasons for sharing as well.

[1]  C E Koop,et al.  A personal role in health care reform. , 1995, American journal of public health.

[2]  James H Fowler,et al.  Social Network Visualization in Epidemiology. , 2009, Norsk epidemiologi = Norwegian journal of epidemiology.

[3]  Bernard J. Jansen,et al.  Twitter power: Tweets as electronic word of mouth , 2009, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[4]  Alex Leavitt,et al.  The Influentials : New Approaches for Analyzing Influence on Twitter , 2009 .

[5]  Timothy W. Finin,et al.  Why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities , 2007, WebKDD/SNA-KDD '07.

[6]  Ben Kirman,et al.  Motivating physical activity at work: using persuasive social media for competitive step counting , 2010, MindTrek.

[7]  V. Strecher.  Internet methods for delivering behavioral and health-related interventions (eHealth). , 2007, Annual review of clinical psychology.

[8]  B. J. Fogg,et al.  Persuasive technology: using computers to change what we think and do , 2002, UBIQ.

[9]  Hosung Park,et al.  What is Twitter, a social network or a news media? , 2010, WWW '10.

[10]  Katja Hose,et al.  Partout: a distributed engine for efficient RDF processing , 2012, WWW.

[11]  F. Griffiths,et al.  Why Are Health Care Interventions Delivered Over the Internet? A Systematic Review of the Published Literature , 2006, Journal of medical Internet research.

[12]  Fabio A. Almeida.  The relationship between social networks, social support, physical activity and self-rated health: An exploratory study , 2008 .

[13]  Hans Oh,et al.  What is eHealth?: a systematic review of published definitions. , 2005, World hospitals and health services : the official journal of the International Hospital Federation.

[14]  Tim Pitt,et al.  Physiology of Sport and Exercise , 2004 .

[15]  Claudio R. Nigg,et al.  Technology’s influence on physical activity and exercise science: the present and the future , 2003 .

[16]  Koop Ce,et al.  A personal role in health care reform. , 1995 .

[17]  B. J. Fogg.  Healthy Living with Persuasive Technologies : Framework , Issues , and Challenges , 2009 .