Clash of Agents: Coping, agency conflicts and continued effective use of wearables

Note: This event is primarily for employees at the Department of Informatics. If you are not part of this group but would like to join, please contact Carla Böhme. 

Despite wearable self-tracking devices’ potential to improve their users’ health, they do not live up to that potential when users discontinue using them after short periods or use them in ineffective ways. To yield positive health effects, wearables must not only be used but also used effectively, that is, in a way that helps achieve the goals for using them. While the literature on what can help to ensure effective use is conclusive, little is known about the dynamics that are at play once effective use is established. 

This study adopts a coping theory perspective to examine how negative incidents and the ways users cope with them reinforce or threaten established effective wearable use. The study uses 62 interviews with users of wearables to identify patterns spanning negative incidents, emotional states, ways of coping, and their impact on continued effective use. The study’s findings indicate that, while some ways of coping, such as engaging in the requested behaviors, improved effective use, others, such as adapting the system or venting, had no considerable effects, while still others, such as cheating, hampered effective use. 

The analysis yielded four generative mechanisms – self-control, confirmation, progress, and datafication – that give rise to distinct coping patterns and affect effective use. Two contextual conditions, agency structure and structural barriers, explain users’ selection of (mal)adaptive coping patterns under different generative mechanisms. The study’s findings contribute to the literatures that focus on effective use, coping, and wearables and have implications for practice.

Paper: Rieder, A. (2025). Between human and system agency: Coping with negative incidents for continued effective use of wearables. Information Systems Research, Articles in Advance. 

Preprint (free access)

About Annamina

Annamina Reider an Assistant Professor of Management Information Systems at the Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University, Canada. She received her Ph.D. in Management from the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland. Her research examines how digital technologies – particularly agentic systems that act with varying degrees of autonomy – shape and serve society. At the core of her work is a commitment to understanding how people engage with information systems in everyday life and how their design can support humanistic outcomes. She focuses on topics such as agentic systems, effective use, and persuasive design, in the domains of digital health, digital platforms, and the art world. Her work has appeared in leading journals including Information Systems Research, European Journal of Information Systems, and Journal of Information Technology.