How one small step for occupational health management leads to many steps for employees - an experimental field study of incentive designs in a gamified mHealth app

Physical inactivity has become one of the leading health risk factors in today's work environment, and in response, companies show increasing interest in digital health interventions to promote employees' well-being. Tools such as mHealth apps use promising approaches to encourage people to be more physically active, for example, through gamification elements combined with financial incentives. However, there is a lack of research on how these technologies and incentives need to be designed to affect employees' health behaviour positively. Based on prospect theory, this study examines the effect of gamified loss-oriented vs gain-oriented financial incentive systems with identical economic value to promote physical activity of employees. Our experiment's results showed an overall positive effect in increasing employees' physical activity (mean daily step count); more specifically, the advantage of a loss-oriented versus a gain-oriented incentive strategy compared to the control group.