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Design requirements for technologies that encourage physical activity

Published: 22 April 2006 Publication History

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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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CHI '06: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      April 2006
      1353 pages
      ISBN:1595933727
      DOI:10.1145/1124772
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Publication History

      Published: 22 April 2006

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      Author Tags

      1. design requirements
      2. fitness
      3. mobile phone
      4. obesity
      5. overweight
      6. pedometer
      7. physical activity
      8. social support

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      CHI06: CHI 2006 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      April 22 - 27, 2006
      Québec, Montréal, Canada

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