Beyond Passive Monitoring: A Systematic Review of Tangible Interactive Devices that Support Home-Based Physical Activity

Encouraging home-based physical activity (PA) is increasingly important for public health. While smartphones and smartwatches are widely adopted, passive monitoring fails to effectively promote home exercise, providing basic metrics without meaningful feedback or user-preference alignment. Recent technological advances enable interactive, tangible devices designed for home PA interventions. We systematically reviewed 21 studies published since 2015 describing functional devices with physical components designed for stand-alone home use to analyse device categories, modalities, feedback mechanisms, and behaviour change techniques (BCTs). Our findings show a dominance of embedded systems that support strength and balance activities, visual-heavy feedback, limited layering of triggers, and a limited use of BCTs directly linked to habit formation. We offer design directions for tangible devices that support PA in home environments and promote durable behaviour change through emphasising stationary aerobic micro routines, layering prompts embedded in objects, and providing a mix of real-time and delayed feedback.