Wellness Routines with Wearable Activity Trackers: A Systematic Review

With the advent of technological advancements, different types of wearables are built and introduced to individuals to better quantify and monitor their lifestyles. This helps in creating awareness among individuals about their health and wellness, motivating them to make healthy changes in their lifestyles. The young-elderly (aged 60–75) age group constitutes an important segment of the society, which is growing worldwide, but with little or no attention of researchers and practitioners. Wearables offer lots of open research avenues; with a proper integration with new and existing mobile applications it will be possible to build systematic and smart life routines for users. Designing wearables for young elderly is an interesting design challenge with its own set of requirements. We have carried out a systematic review of current literature to get an understanding of how wearables can support wellness routines for individuals. The purpose is to study the current state of art in creating wellness routines with wearables as technological interventions. In doing so we present a categorization of existing approaches and a summarization of different design recommendations that serve different design goals. The review also suggests a clear lack of efforts to address the needs of the young-elderly. We suggest an introduction of action design research to encourage users to be part of a co-creation process that would help to lower adoption barriers for the young elderly.