Beyond Intrinsic: Using the Quality of Extrinsic Motivation to Understand Effort in Virtual Rehabilitation and Exergames

Intrinsic motivation is often regarded as the ideal when developing computer-mediated technology for health and rehabilitation activities in HCI-research. Even though intrinsic motivation is indeed a sustainable and self-rewarding form of motivation, arguably both extrinsic and intrinsic types of motivation are influential factors to an individual's self-regulation that ultimately drives human behavior. Thus, HCI-researchers should embrace instruments that encompasses the wider continuum of motivation rather than just intrinsic motivation alone. To this end we propose a (yet unvalidated) instrument based on SIMS, and encourage researchers to include the RAI to detect changes in motivational quality during interventions involving exergames or virtual rehabilitation.