WalkMinder: encouraging an active lifestyle using mobile phone interruptions

ABSTRACT

Medical research suggests that avoiding lengthy periods of physical inactivity can have significant health benefits. The pervasive nature of mobile phones increasingly allows individuals to track and measure their own physical activity thus creating opportunities for them to reflect on their behavior and make informed changes. In this work, we investigated two mechanisms for encouraging a more active lifestyle: a glanceable display of an individual's level of physical activity and mobile phone vibrations to interrupt extended periods of inactivity. We found that both mechanisms can help users become more aware of their activity patterns but may be ignored unless coupled with concrete advice on how to incorporate active moments into their day.

References

1. Ainsworth, B. E., Leon, A. S., Richardson, M. T., Jacobs, D. R. & Paffenbarger Jr, R. S. Accuracy of the college alumnus physical activity questionnaire. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 46, 12 (1993), 14031411.
2. Bey, L. & Hamilton, M. T. Suppression of skeletal muscle lipoprotein lipase activity during physical inactivity: a molecular reason to maintain daily lowintensity activity. J Physiol, 551, Pt 2 (2003), 673--682.
3. Fan, C., Forlizzi, J. & Dey, A. A Spark Of Activity: Exploring Information Art As Visualization For Physical Activity. In Ubicomp 2012 2012, (2012).
4. Fitbit. The Magic of 10,000 steps. http://blog.fitbit.com/?p=194. Accessed September 2010.
5. Fujiki, Y., Kazakos, K., Puri, C., Buddharaju, P., Pavlidis, I. & Levine, J. NEAT-o-Games: blending physical activity and fun in the daily routine. Comput. Entertain., 6, 2 (2008), 1--22.
6. Hamilton, M. T., Hamilton, D. G. & Zderic, T. W. Role of low energy expenditure and sitting in obesity, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Diabetes, 56, 11 (2007), 2655--2667.
7. Lin, J. J., Mamykina, L., Lindtner, S., Delajoux, G. & Strub, H. B. Fish'n'Steps: encouraging physical activity with an interactive computer game. In Ubicomp 2006, Springer-Verlag (2006) 261--278.
8. Manohar, C. U., Koepp, G. A., McCrady-Spitzer, S. K. & Levine, J. A. A Stand-Alone Accelerometer System for Free-Living Individuals to Measure and Promote Physical Activity. ICAN: Infant, Child, & Adolescent Nutrition, 4, 4 (2012), 222--229.
9. Morris, D., Brush, A. J. B. & Meyers, B. R. SuperBreak: using interactivity to enhance ergonomic typing breaks. In Proceedings of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems 2008, ACM (2008) 1817--1826.
10. Munson, S. A. & Consolvo, S. Exploring goal-setting, rewards, self-monitoring, and sharing to motivate physical activity. In PervasiveHealth 2012, (2012) 2532.
11. Norman, G. & Mills, P. Keeping it Simple: Encouraging walking as a means to active living. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 28, 3 (2004), 149--151.
12. Patel, A. V., Bernstein, L., Deka, A., Feigelson, H. S., Campbell, P. T., Gapstur, S. M., Colditz, G. A. & Thun, M. J. Leisure Time Spent Sitting in Relation to Total Mortality in a Prospective Cohort of US Adults. American Journal of Epidemiology, 172, 4 (2010), 419--429.
13. Schneider, P. L., Bassett, D. R., Thompson, D. L., Pronk, N. P. & Bielak, K. M. Effects of a 10,000 Steps per Day Goal in Overweight Adults. American Journal of Health Promotion, 21, 2 (2006), 85--89.
14. Stouffs, A. Interruptions as Multimodal Outputs: Which are the Less Disruptive? In Proceedings of the 4th IEEE International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces 2002, IEEE Computer Society (2002) 479.
15. Toscos, T., Faber, A., An, S. & Gandhi, M. Chick clique: persuasive technology to motivate teenage girls to exercise. In CHI 2006, ACM (2006) 1873--1878.
16. van der Ploeg, H. P., Chey, T., Korda, R. J., Banks, E. & Bauman, A. Sitting time and all-cause mortality risk in 222 497 Australian adults. Arch Intern Med, 172, 6 (2012), 494--500.

Index Terms

• Human-centered computing