Promoting Health Knowledge Among University Students

Background: The interactions between human beings and wearable technology like activity trackers equipped with biometric sensors can be linked to health related new learning concepts/instructional methods supporting deep knowledge acquisition, situated, self-regulated and active learning. This personalized, long term interactions where specific information is pushed to the learner contributes to deepen the personal understanding related to the concept of and knowledge about health and has an impact on long term health action process. Design and methods: In order to understand the behavioural change process, a multiple case study including 35 higher education students in Hong Kong from an undergraduate course, BSc Exercise and Health is currently conducted. Each student uses a wearable device (activity tracker) over a period of five months, reflects weekly on emerging personal data, documents their thinking and action in the ePortfolio, and engages in an online forum. The participants enter their experiences with the biometric data, lifestyle adaptations (e.g. more steps), special situations (e.g. hike, heart rate changes during activity) and how these experiences lead to specific searches and actions on the web and/or in their real social network. The ePortfolio will allow the students to critically reflect on their progress and for the researchers to intervene at any time on the issues related to the participants' postings. EHealth literacy is used as indicator for the health action process of the participants. Evidence regarding change in eHealth at the beginning and end of the intervention will be collected with a standard questionnaire detecting eHealth their literacy scale. Scope: By reflecting on the information from their personal activity tracker and documenting it in their own ePortfolio, the students will continuously learn to analyse, search and critically assess health related personal and available digital information, organize it, present and discuss