This paper explores the feasibility of using sonification in delivering and communicating health and wellness status on personal devices. Ambient displays have proven to inform users of their health and wellness and help them to make healthier decisions, yet, little technology provides health assessments through sounds, which can be even more pervasive than visual displays. We developed a method to generate music from user preferences and evaluated it in a two-step user study. In the first step, we acquired general healthiness impressions from each user. In the second step, we generated customized melodies from music preferences in the first step to capture participants' perceived healthiness of those melodies. We deployed our surveys for 55 participants to complete on their own over 31 days. We analyzed the data to understand commonalities and differences in users' perceptions of music as an expression of health. Our findings show the existence of clear associations between perceived healthiness and different music features. We provide useful insights into how different musical features impact the perceived healthiness of music, how perceptions of healthiness vary between users, what trends exist between users' impressions, and what influences (or does not influence) a user's perception of healthiness in a melody. Overall, our results indicate validity in presenting health data through personalized music models. The findings can inform the design of behavior management applications on personal and ubiquitous devices.
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This content will become publicly available on May 13, 2025
Changing Your Tune: Lessons for Using Music to Encourage Physical Activity
Our research investigated whether music can communicate physical activity levels in daily life. Past studies have shown that simple musical tunes can provide wellness information, but no study has examined whether musical feedback can affect daily behavior or lead to healthier habits. We conducted a within-subject study with 62 participants over a period of 76 days, providing either musical or text-based feedback on their daily physical activity. The music was built and personalized based on participants' step counts and baseline wellness perceptions. Results showed that participants were marginally more active during the music feedback compared to their baseline period, and significantly more active compared to the text-based feedback (p = 0.000). We also find that the participant's average activity may influence the musical features they find most inspiration within a song. Finally, context influenced how musical feedback was interpreted, and specific musical features correlated with higher activity levels regardless of baseline perceptions. We discuss lessons learned for designing music-based feedback systems for health communication.
more » « less- PAR ID:
- 10532006
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
- Volume:
- 8
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 2474-9567
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 24
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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