Paper Reading #23: Activity Awareness in Family-Based Healthy Living Online Social Networks

Comments
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.

An example of the charts provided to users regarding activity. Source: Paper

A user study was conducted with four-member families trying out the system. Two groups were used, a group without using the interface and a group that used the interface. Results showed that those that used the system had more interaction with family members, had easier access to health resources, could learn more about healthy living, and enjoyed the graphs. Users were motivated to learn and the system helped them to identify areas of healthy living that needed improvement.

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.