Risk and trust in self-tracking via fitness apps

Digitalization and the availability of smartphones have changed the way people communicate and how they gain information about themselves and their environment. In health and lifestyle contexts, fitness apps have become widely used tools to track and enhance health behavior such as physical activity. Fitness apps offer various functions, such as tracking of activities, steps, and calories. Self-tracking via fitness apps can entail both important benefits and risks. On the one hand, fitness app usage can contribute to health behavior, e.g., to enhance physical activity and to help establishing health-related routines. However, self-tracking via fitness apps can also entail certain risks, such as privacy issues or biased measurements. Beyond the background of these risks, trust emerges as an essential factor to understand the trajectories of healthy and maintained fitness app usage. In this work, an overview of the practice of self-tracking is provided including the specific aspects of self-tracking via fitness apps is provided. Then, risks and benefits that are associated with self-tracking via fitness apps are presented. A trust-based model is introduced that can assist to understand the trajectories of fitness app usage. Finally, practice-relevant implications for safe, healthy, and maintained self-tracking via fitness apps are derived.