Refreshed is a theory-grounded digital wellness platform that delivers scheduled movement and breathing sessions to work-from-home employees—with context-aware prompting via Apple Watch. Designed from the ground up as configurable research infrastructure.
A digital wellness platform designed to interrupt prolonged sedentary behaviour during remote work through brief, guided movement and breathing sessions.
60 seconds – 3 minutes | 4× daily
Brief guided exercises targeting circulation, posture, and energy. Desk-friendly movements requiring no equipment—designed around the "micro-break" evidence base for affective and fatigue benefits, progressing toward durations with metabolic benefit.
2, 3, or 5 minutes | 2× daily
Evidence-based breathing patterns for stress management and recovery. Timed to natural energy dips (mid-morning, mid-afternoon) based on circadian research.
In B=MAP terms, when motivation fluctuates (as it does throughout a workday), behaviour depends on Ability. Micro-duration sessions (60s) lower the ability threshold sufficiently that behaviour can occur even at moderate motivation levels—supporting habit formation where longer sessions would fail.
Web push at key daily moments (e.g. 09:00, 11:30, 14:00). Maximum starts at 3/day to avoid notification fatigue.
Apple Watch monitors HealthKit step data. After 45 minutes of inactivity, triggers a sedentary alert with quick exercise option.
Full schedule visible in-app. Users can start sessions proactively, choose alternatives, or access breathing exercises anytime.
In B=MAP, behaviour requires a Prompt that arrives when motivation and ability are sufficient. Prompt effectiveness depends on timing (circadian alignment, sedentary duration), channel (push notification vs watch vs in-app), and context-awareness. The optimal prompt configuration for sustained engagement is an empirical question this platform is designed to answer.
Aligned to work rhythms, circadian patterns, and prolonged sitting research
Prolonged sedentary behaviour is an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and premature mortality—even among people who exercise regularly. The issue isn't lack of physical activity; it's uninterrupted sitting during the workday. Brief, regular movement breaks can mitigate these risks, but the behaviour must actually occur.
Working from home is consistently associated with increased sedentary exposure—particularly through longer uninterrupted sitting bouts. Accelerometer studies show WFH days involve 30–90 minutes more sitting than office days, even when exercise levels are maintained.
The mechanisms are environmental, not motivational. Office environments embed natural movement prompts: walking to meetings, spatial separation of resources, social interruptions. WFH removes these prompts, shifting behaviour from automatic to reflective control.
"Available evidence suggests the primary constraint isn't motivation—remote workers who maintain exercise habits still accumulate more sedentary time. The more parsimonious explanation: the environmental prompts that previously triggered incidental movement have been removed."
Digital interventions can reduce sedentary behaviour—systematic reviews demonstrate short-term effectiveness. But sustained engagement remains inconsistent, and high attrition is widely reported. The evidence for movement breaks exists. What remains less understood is how to design digital solutions that effectively prompt and sustain the behaviour.
In COM-B terms, WFH reduces physical and social Opportunity for movement. If sedentary behaviour persists primarily due to opportunity constraints rather than motivation deficits, then restoring structured opportunities through scheduled intervention should achieve behaviour change—even without targeting motivation directly.
Refreshed synthesises multiple behaviour change frameworks into a coherent intervention architecture—not eclectically assembling features, but systematically operationalising principles with attention to tensions between frameworks.
Behaviour occurs when motivation, ability, and prompt converge. We maximise ability through friction reduction and deliver prompts at moments of elevated motivation.
Clear's four laws operationalised: make it obvious (scheduled prompts), attractive (positive framing), easy (60-second sessions), and satisfying (immediate feedback).
Capability through guided instruction, opportunity through prompt restoration, motivation through reinforcement. All three determinants systematically addressed.
Following Fogg's Tiny Habits methodology, behaviour should be established at minimal scale before increasing demands. The phase progression (Foundation 60s → Expanded 90s → Boost 120s+) hypothesises that users who build consistency with achievable micro-sessions will successfully graduate to longer durations aligned with the metabolic evidence base—rather than plateauing or abandoning the behaviour.
Refreshed separates configurable parameters from core functionality, enabling controlled comparison of different configurations while maintaining consistent measurement infrastructure.
Each parameter can be varied independently or in combination for factorial designs.
Session completion, engagement patterns, phase progression tracked across all conditions.
Research conducted through a functioning platform used in real-world WFH conditions.
Between-subjects, within-subjects, factorial, and adaptive designs all supported.
The platform enables investigation of implementation questions that fixed interventions cannot address.
Does 3/day outperform 5/day? At what point does frequency become counterproductive? Does this vary by user characteristics?
At what session duration does completion rate begin to decline? Does this threshold change as habits strengthen?
Do sedentary-threshold triggers achieve better outcomes than fixed clock-based prompts?
Does the 60→90→120 second progression work, or do users plateau at Foundation?
Are high-engagement users better served by different configurations than low-engagement users?
Which baseline characteristics predict sustained participation and phase progression?
This research will investigate how specific design parameters—informed by behaviour change theory—affect engagement and habit formation in micro-movement interventions for distributed remote workers.
While the effectiveness of behaviour change techniques and JITAIs is established, the optimal translation of these principles into specific design decisions for this growing population remains under-researched. This practice-based inquiry will address this gap through controlled experimentation, generating ecologically valid, practitioner-relevant design principles.
Final experimental design and parameters to be confirmed following ethics approval and pilot testing.
This doctoral research investigates behaviour change implementation—which design parameters make digital interventions effective, for whom, and under what conditions. The research questions concern notification timing, session duration, prompt channels, and habit formation trajectories, not physiological or clinical outcomes.