Digitization of sport participation for health

Physical inactivity is a global issue to which both scholars and practitioners are seeking solutions. Encouraging regular sport participation has been argued as an effective approach that improves population health. Meanwhile, the evolution of digitalization has drastically impacted people's ways of living, including sport participation. Researchers have identified the impacts that the application of digital technology, such as the Internet, smartphones, and virtual reality tools, has on facilitating sport participation. Although prior work addresses these impacts from the perspective of an individual's psychological and behavioral changes, an understanding of the influence of digitalization that considers social and environmental factors is fragmented. This chapter applies a social-ecological model (McLeroy et al., 1988) to provide a framework for illustrating how technologies facilitate sport participation for health by changing attributes at multiple levels of environmental influence. According to our framework, wearable devices and smartphones enhance both intrapersonal- and institutional-level factors for sport participation. Social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, influence interpersonal- and community-level factors by diversifying ways of social interactions and expanding social networks. Big data analytics tools facilitate policy-level factors by elevating the process of information collection. This chapter concludes by providing suggestions for future research on technologies and sport participation.