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Conceptualising an Initial Design Space for Guidance in Digital Physical Activity Support
Faith Young, Markus Tatzgern, Alexander Meschtscherjakov, Jan Smeddinck
TL;DR
Digital physical activity support lacks a clear definition of guidance and often conflates it with personalisation, feedback, or persuasion. This conceptual paper defines guidance as situated, action-oriented support and proposes a nine-dimensional design space, offering a structured vocabulary for analysing, comparing, and designing interventions. The framework remains an initial contribution requiring empirical validation and broader cultural refinement.
Problem
Guidance in digital physical activity support is under-theorised and often embedded implicitly in prompts, feedback, or recommendations, limiting systematic comparison and analysis.
Method
The paper synthesises behaviour change, HCI, motor learning, embodied cognition, and digital health perspectives into a working definition and nine-dimensional design space.
Results
The paper defines guidance as situated, action-oriented support that scaffolds users’ embodied engagement in physical activity and distinguishes it from related constructs.
Takeaways & Limitations
The design space provides a structured vocabulary and lens for describing, comparing, and designing guidance beyond motivation-focused intervention accounts.
Takeaways & Limitations
The design space has not yet been empirically validated, is derived primarily from Western literature, and may require future refinement as technologies evolve.
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
Providing guidance is frequently referenced as a key capability of digital health interventions targeting physical activity, yet the term remains poorly defined and inconsistently applied. Existing work often conflates guidance with related constructs such as personalisation, feedback, or persuasion, limiting both theoretical clarity and design progress. This paper conceptualises an initial design space of guidance in the context of digital physical activity support. We define guidance for physical activity as situated, action-oriented support that scaffolds users' embodied engagement in physical activity. Drawing on literature from behaviour change, human-computer interaction, embodied cognition, and digital health, we outline a design space that characterises guidance along multiple dimensions: scope, purpose, timing, context, modality, embodiment, adaptivity, autonomy, and affective quality. By offering a structured vocabulary and conceptual foundation, this work aims to support more coherent research, comparisons, and responsible design of digital health interventions featuring guidance for physical activity support.
1 Introduction
Physical inactivity remains a major health challenge, while many digital physical activity interventions struggle to translate intentions into sustained action. This paper addresses the conceptual gap by defining guidance and proposing a structured design space for designing and comparing guided interventions.
- About one-third of adults fail to meet the guideline of at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity per week.
- Nearly half of people with strong physical activity intentions do not act on them, highlighting a persistent intention–behaviour gap shaped by dynamic contexts.Momentary intention is described as a proximal driver of physical activity enactment, but situational and affective factors can impede action.
- Digital interventions commonly use goal-setting, self-monitoring, feedback, and persuasive prompts, yet many show high attrition and limited long-term impact.
- Guidance remains poorly defined because terms such as feedback, instruction, coaching, and nudging are often used interchangeably.This ambiguity makes it difficult to determine whether systems support action or merely provide information or motivation.
- The paper proposes a working definition distinguishing guidance from personalisation, feedback, and persuasion, and introduces nine dimensions for analysing and designing it.The dimensions are scope, purpose, timing, context, modality, embodiment, adaptivity, autonomy, and affective quality.
- The design space is intended as an initial conceptual contribution supporting discussion, comparison, evaluation, and future empirical refinement.
2 Conceptual Background
Digital physical activity interventions can improve activity levels in the short term, but sustaining behaviour change remains difficult. Related fields frame guidance as timely, situated, action-oriented support, motivating a distinct conceptualisation for digital physical activity systems.
- 2.1 Digital Health Interventions for Physical Activity: Systematic reviews find small to moderate improvements in activity levels from digital physical activity interventions, particularly in the short term.Effects often diminish over time, alongside high attrition and declining engagement.
- 2.2 Guidance in Adjacent Domains: Guidance research across education, coaching, rehabilitation, and human–robot interaction informs how systems can scaffold task performance, learning, and shared action.
- 2.2 Guidance in Adjacent Domains: Across adjacent domains, guidance is action-oriented, timely, situationally relevant, and focused on supporting performance and learning.
- 2.2 Guidance in Adjacent Domains: Contextual and affective fluctuations can prevent momentary intentions from becoming physical activity, making timely situated support relevant to the intention–behaviour gap.
- 2.2 Guidance in Adjacent Domains: The MAGnify framework positions guidance as the action-enabling layer addressing how, when, and where activity occurs, between motivation and behaviour.
- 2.3 Guidance in Digital Health and Physical Activity: Digital health interventions often invoke guidance as coaching or instruction without defining or operationalising it systematically, limiting comparison and design of systems that scaffold action.
- 2.3 Guidance in Digital Health and Physical Activity: AI- and AR-enabled systems expand opportunities for in-the-moment, context-aware, and embodied guidance while raising concerns about autonomy, transparency, and dependency.
3 Defining Guidance in the Context of Physical Activity
The paper defines digital physical activity guidance as situated, action-oriented support that helps users enact activity through timely, context-sensitive, and embodied interventions. It distinguishes guidance from related constructs by emphasising direct operational support for doing.
- Guidance for digital physical activity is situated, action-oriented support that assists users in enacting activity through timely, context-sensitive, and embodied interventions.
- A feature becomes guidance when it establishes an actionable relation between system support and user activity, helping users decide what, how, or when to act.
- Guidance enables direct performance of physical activity and scaffolds doing through real-time instructions, cues, or corrections, unlike personalisation focused primarily on recommendation content.
- Guidance is sensitive to physical, social, and capability-related context, such as weather, terrain, or proximity to safe routes.
- Embodied guidance supports the body during movement through visual demonstrations, haptic feedback, or posture corrections.
- Guidance is delivered when it can influence action and may adapt to performance, progress, or situational change, while also covering macro aspects of support.
- Guidance may combine personalisation, feedback, instruction, and persuasion, but remains distinct through direct, situated, operational support for skilful and embodied action.
4 Exploring the Design Space in Digital Physical Activity Support
The paper proposes a nine-dimensional design space for characterising guidance in digital physical activity interventions. The dimensions provide a structured lens for describing how, when, and to what extent systems support action.
- The design space characterises guidance across purpose, scope, timing, context, modality, embodiment, adaptivity, autonomy, and affective quality.
4.1 Development of the Design Space
The design space was developed through a purposive conceptual synthesis that integrated established constructs rarely combined in one framework. It is intended as a sensitizing structure for making guidance design choices visible and comparable, not prescribing an optimal configuration.
- Development of the Design Space: The authors used purposive conceptual synthesis, iterative examination of adjacent literatures, and snowball discovery rather than a systematic review.Candidate dimensions were retained when they described recurring design choices and shaped how support was delivered.
- Development of the Design Space: Table 1 situates guidance alongside related digital-health concepts.
- Development of the Design Space: The framework integrates dimensions that prior work commonly examines independently but rarely unifies into one conceptual structure.
- Development of the Design Space: The resulting design space is a sensitizing framework for systematic analysis, comparison, and design rather than a prescription for an optimal guidance configuration.
4.2 Design Space Dimensions
Guidance is represented as a nine-dimensional design space describing what support does, when and where it occurs, how it is delivered, and how it engages users. The dimensions include both broad design choices and different levels of support granularity.
- Design Space Dimensions: The design space contains nine interrelated dimensions: purpose, timing, context, modality, embodiment, adaptivity, autonomy, scope, and affective quality.Sub-aspects are classified as continual, non-ordered, or spectra.
- Scope: Scope distinguishes micro-level movement execution, meso-level session management, and macro-level longer-term progression.These levels can overlap rather than functioning as mutually exclusive categories.
- Purpose: Purpose covers initiating action, supporting execution, regulating performance, correcting errors, and facilitating reflection.Examples include action-planning prompts, pacing alerts, posture cues, and post-activity summaries.
4.2.3 Timing
Timing characterises guidance by when it is delivered relative to physical activity and whether support is continuous or episodic. The section also situates timing within context-aware and modality choices shaped by activity conditions.
- Timing: Timing distinguishes pre-activity, in-the-moment, and post-activity guidance, as well as continuous versus episodic delivery.Continuous support persists throughout activity, whereas episodic support occurs at discrete moments.
- Timing: In-the-moment guidance can influence safety, performance, and engagement, while post-activity guidance supports reflection and habit formation.JITAIs frame timing around moments of heightened receptivity or need.
- Context: Context-aware guidance responds to physical, social, and bodily conditions, but over-automation may undermine user agency.
- Modality: Visual, auditory, haptic, and multimodal channels offer different attentional demands, with auditory or haptic guidance often better suited to movement than visual guidance.The appropriate modality should align with bodily effort and movement constraints.
4.2.6 Embodiment
Embodiment describes how closely guidance is connected to bodily movement, while adaptivity and autonomy describe how systems adjust support and distribute control. Together, these dimensions connect guidance to sensorimotor experience and user agency.
- Embodiment: Embodied guidance ranges from abstract or symbolic representations to body-referenced feedback and directly embodied support.
- Embodiment: Movement-coupled feedback can be more effective than abstract instruction alone, supporting a continuum-based analysis of how interfaces engage the moving body.
- Adaptivity: Adaptivity ranges from static guidance through rule-based adjustment to AI-driven personalisation based on behaviour, performance, or context.Greater system intelligence raises concerns about transparency, predictability, user control, and ethical accountability.
- Autonomy: Autonomy concerns whether guidance is optional, overrideable, and transparent, with overly controlling systems risking reduced intrinsic motivation or dependency.
4.2.9 Affective Quality
Affective quality treats guidance as shaped by tone, timing, persistence, and fit with the user’s state and activity context. The dimensions interact, so guidance can support immediate action or later learning through different configurations.
- Affective quality concerns whether guidance is encouraging, neutral, or corrective and whether its tone, timing, and persistence fit the user’s state and activity context.
- Real-time AR guidance can combine modality, embodiment, adaptivity, and execution-oriented purpose, while requiring careful autonomy management.
- Post-activity reflection can use abstract visualisation with low adaptivity to support learning rather than immediate action.
- The nine interdependent dimensions provide a structured way to conceptualise and evaluate guidance across behavioural and technological considerations.
5 Discussion
The discussion reframes guidance as an embodied, situated, and multidimensional design concern rather than merely informational or motivational content. The proposed space supports comparison and deliberation, while remaining illustrative, conceptually grounded, and not yet empirically validated.
- 5.1 Reframing Guidance in Digital Physical Activity: Guidance is reframed as relational and situated support that shapes how users initiate, perform, regulate, and reflect on physical activity.
- 5.1 Reframing Guidance in Digital Physical Activity: In-the-moment embodied guidance may enhance performance and safety but risks greater cognitive load or perceived intrusiveness, whereas reflective guidance may support learning without immediate behavioural impact.
- 5.2 Integrating Perspectives: The framework integrates behavioural intent, interaction design, and bodily action into a shared vocabulary for interdisciplinary research and design.
- 5.3 Illustrative Application: Figure 2 illustratively maps human personal training, a conventional exercise recommender, and a contextualised AI-supported recommender onto the design space.
- 5.4 Implications for Design and Evaluation of DHIs: The design space prompts explicit decisions about purpose, timing, modality, and autonomy and supports evaluation of experience, perceived autonomy, learning, and long-term engagement.
- 5.5 Limitations: The framework is primarily conceptual, has not been empirically validated, and may require refinement across physical activity contexts, user groups, and evolving technologies.
6 Conclusion
The paper concludes with a multidimensional design space that addresses a conceptual gap in digital physical activity guidance. Its nine dimensions provide a vocabulary for structured analysis and design, while empirical validation remains future work.
- The framework provides a structured lens for understanding how, when, and to what extent guidance supports action in digital physical activity interventions.
- The design space articulates nine interrelated dimensions: scope, purpose, timing, context, modality, embodiment, adaptivity, autonomy, and affective quality.
- The framework can inform context-sensitive intervention design, systematic evaluation, and interdisciplinary research, although empirical validation remains a future step.