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Proceedings ArticleDOI

Design requirements for technologies that encourage physical activity

TLDR
Houston, a prototype mobile phone application for encouraging activity by sharing step count with friends is described and four design requirements for technologies that encourage physical activity are presented, derived from a three-week long in situ pilot study that was conducted with women who wanted to increase their physical activity.
Abstract
Overweight and obesity are a global epidemic, with over one billion overweight adults worldwide (300+ million of whom are obese). Obesity is linked to several serious health problems and medical conditions. Medical experts agree that physical activity is critical to maintaining fitness, reducing weight, and improving health, yet many people have difficulty increasing and maintaining physical activity in everyday life. Clinical studies have shown that health benefits can occur from simply increasing the number of steps one takes each day and that social support can motivate people to stay active. In this paper, we describe Houston, a prototype mobile phone application for encouraging activity by sharing step count with friends. We also present four design requirements for technologies that encourage physical activity that we derived from a three-week long in situ pilot study that was conducted with women who wanted to increase their physical activity.

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Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI

Persuasive Systems Design: Key Issues, Process Model, and System Features

TL;DR: The process of designing and evaluating persuasive systems is discussed and what kind of content and software functionality may be found in the final product is described, as well as seven underlying postulates behind persuasive systems and ways to analyze the persuasion context.
Proceedings ArticleDOI

Activity sensing in the wild: a field trial of ubifit garden

TL;DR: This work has developed a system, UbiFit Garden, which uses on-body sensing and activity inference and a personal, mobile display to encourage physical activity to address the growing rate of sedentary lifestyles.
Journal ArticleDOI

Methodological Review: Healthcare in the pocket: Mapping the space of mobile-phone health interventions

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors describe the features of mobile phones that make them a particularly promising platform for health interventions, and identify five basic intervention strategies that have been used in mobile-phone health applications across different health conditions.
Book ChapterDOI

Fish'n'Steps: encouraging physical activity with an interactive computer game

TL;DR: A social computer game, Fish'n'Steps, which links a player's daily foot step count to the growth and activity of an animated virtual character, a fish in a fish tank, to promote an increase in physical activity.
Proceedings ArticleDOI

Theory-driven design strategies for technologies that support behavior change in everyday life

TL;DR: This paper proposes design strategies for persuasive technologies that help people who want to change their everyday behaviors and designs and builds a system that encourages people to lead a physically active lifestyle.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

In search of how people change: Applications to addictive behaviors.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors summarized research on self-initiated and professionally facilitated change of addictive behaviors using the key transtheoretical constructs of stages and processes of change.
Book

Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do

B. J. Fogg
TL;DR: Mother Nature knows best--How engineered organizations of the future will resemble natural-born systems.
Book

Persuasive technology : using computers to change what we think and do

B. J. Fogg
TL;DR: Fogg has coined the phrase Captology (an acronym for computers as persuasive technologies) to capture the domain of research, design, and applications of persuasive computers as mentioned in this paper, and has revealed how Web sites, software applications, and mobile devices can be used to change people's attitudes and behavior.
Journal Article

A practical approach to recognizing physical activities

TL;DR: In this paper, a personal activity recognition system based on a cell phone platform augmented with a Bluetooth-connected sensor board is proposed to recognize 8 different activities collected from 12 different subjects.
Proceedings ArticleDOI

Exertion interfaces: sports over a distance for social bonding and fun

TL;DR: The results suggest that an Exertion Interface, as compared to a traditional interface, offers increased opportunities for connecting people socially, especially when they have never met before.
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