The empirical work presented here focuses on the use of activity-tracking devices and the way they are
adopted by users in practice. Our findings demonstrated two distinct forms of affordances generated by the
use of the devices. For all the participants, the devices served as valuable informational tools by
quantifying and making their daily physical activities visible. What’s more, for a few participants, the
device provided motivational affordances, encouraging more physical activities. To delineate the reasons
behind these differing affordances, our study further highlights consequential individual differences in
terms of perception (personal context) and motivation (self-motivated vs. social motivation) that affect how
individuals use the device to motivate themselves.