Initial results from a pilot study show that tailored video messages delivered online are encouraging people to increase their physical activity levels.

CQUniversity researcher Dr Corneel Vandelanotte says that personally relevant video messages are selected from a database based on each viewer's response to lead-up questions.

Rahel Ammann, Katja Soetens and Dr Corneel Vandelanotte display one of the video messages

Physical activity levels before and after the video interactions are being compared, as well as the delivery of messages via video,  text, or a combination of both.  

Formerly from Belgium, Dr Vandelanotte is now Acting Director for CQUniversity's Centre for Physical Activity Studies, within the Institute for Health and Social Science Research, based in Rockhampton.

He has drawn on academic contacts in The Netherlands to attract Masters students Katja Soetens (from The Netherlands) and Rahel Ammann (from Switzerland via The Netherlands) to help with the project.

Katja and Rahel spent a month preparing for the task in The Netherlands and are now part-way through a three-month visit to Rockhampton, where they are completing the data crunching and preparation of results as part of their Master thesis.

Dr Vandelanotte hopes to gain nationally competitive funding to extend the study to include a wider range of tailored videos.

"Early on we have found that people prefer the videos to be delivered to their computer rather than via hand-held devices and they are responding well to video-delivery, spending about twice as long interacting with the program, compared with text-delivery where people quickly skim and scan the text before moving on ," he said.