Adam Friedli
Cindy Skach
Reference Information
Title: Activity Awareness in Family-Based Healthy Living Online Social Networks
Authors: Stephen Kimani, Shlomo Berkovsky, Greg Smith, Jill Freyne, Nilufar Baghaei, Dipak Bhandari
When/Where: IUI 2010
Summary
This paper discussed a social networking interface for health management purposes. The idea is to motivate people to be more aware and active by using a social, family-oriented environment. The system can record, track, and view healthy activities through both the real world and a social networking environment. Users are shown a scorecard, including charts and graphs of activity performance. A person's performance can be compared to others to lead to a higher level of learning and motivation. Each user has a self-reported diary to log activities in.
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| An example of the charts provided to users regarding activity. Source: Paper |
Discussion
This idea seems like it could be very useful. Many people are now unable to stay healthy, what with the ease of access to fast food and the appeal of sitting in a desk chair at a computer all day long. A system like this could encourage people to live healthier lives, by providing social motivation to improve themselves. This paper did not include very many details about the system itself, although it did have many mathematical terms and equations for calculating performance. It would have been helpful to know more about how the system works. I think the paper makes a good point though. With so much technology, maybe we should start focusing not only on how to best entertain people or how to sell a product to the most amount of people, but how to actually improve peoples' quality of life.
This is awesome! I could easily see this becoming a rivalry between siblings, which would be a great motivator. I guess the only issue is that it looks like users would have to depend on the honor system when it comes to reporting activities. I can see this working fine within a family since they know what others are doing, but not in a larger social network since people could report false information. This is still a really cool idea that could improve the quality of people's lives, as you said.
ReplyDeleteI feel like the idea of having status bars for activities is a great motivator for almost anyone. The ability to surpass others also provides a decent amount of motivation to accomplish most activities.
ReplyDeleteI agree that this could be really useful. Expanding everyones knowledge on health is very applicable
ReplyDeleteI agree, I would have liked to seen a bit more of the implementation described in the paper. Overall though the system seems like it encourages good health.
ReplyDeleteI like the idea behind this, but I wonder whether people would want others to see how much exercise they actually do.
ReplyDeleteIf this was an actual application, I would want it to have an option to turn off sharing, even though it defeats the purpose in a way.