1,720,976 research outputs found
Everywhere race!: A social mobile platform for sport engagement and motivation
No full textA lot of medical researches demonstrate that in the last decades there has been a serious increase of chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes and correlated pathologies. These studies emphasize the key role of a healthy lifestyle in the prevention and cure of these kind of health problems. A healthy lifestyle can be broadly summarized in terms of regular physical activity, a balanced diet, a positive outlook and absence of harmful substances such as alcohol and tobacco. Researchers around the world are experimenting with new techniques and technologies to support and motivate people in their daily physical activity. Ubiquitous mobile devices and their intrinsic relationship with social networks are becoming one of the most popular persuasive technologies adopted in this research area. In this paper we present and evaluate an innovative mobile Android application, called Everywhere Race!, designed to motivate people in a wide range of speed-based sport activities. The peculiarity of the application consists in its groundbreaking way to engage people in sports. Thanks to an intensive usage of social networks and its fun-oriented design it makes it possible, for the first time ever, to compete in real-time with people from all over the world as in a real competition. A preliminary evaluation of the application, conducted on 35 users, shows that the application motivates both non-habitual sportsmen to start working out and habitual ones to keep on exercising
How User Experience Design Can Affect Motivation: A Study on a Real World Sport Application
No full textMany researchers from different scientific fields are developing new strategies to foster individuals toward a physically more active lifestyle. In most cases, these strategies exploit new generation mobile devices together with social networks to augment their persuasive power. In our research work we focus on the study of the effects of these technologies on people’s sport habits. To better study this phenomenon, we are developing a software platform that aims at encouraging people to pursue a more active lifestyle. This work presents an experimentation conducted on Everywhere Run!, a mobile application part of the platform, that aims at helping people to stay active behaving like a virtual personal trainer. Very preliminary tests on the impact of the application on users’ motivations, show that it is perceived as a valuable motivational tool. These tests have been the starting point for this work that presents an interesting result that is closely related to recent radical changes we made to the graphical design and usability of the software. During a six months period, we observed a considerable increment of the total number of daily trainings. To statistically prove the effectiveness of the redesign, we decided to compare the two versions of the application. The results confirm the effectiveness of the new design and bring us to another important intuition that we will better investigate over a longer period of time in our forthcoming researches: user experience may positively influence users’ motivations and their perception of the offered features especially in the long term
Design Guidelines for an Enhanced Interaction Experience in the Domain of Smartphone-Based Applications for Sport and Fitness
No full textNowadays, several research studies point up that an active lifestyle is essential for physical and mental health benefits. Mobile phones have greatly influenced people’s habits and attitudes also in the way they exercise. Our research work is mainly focused on investigating how to exploit mobile technologies to favour people’s exertion experience. To this end, we developed an exertion framework users can exploit through a real world mobile application, called BLINDED, designed to act as a virtual personal trainer to support runners during their trainings. In this work, inspired by both previous findings in the field of interaction design for people with visual impairments, feedback gathered from real users of our framework, and positive results obtained from two experimentations, we present some new interaction facilities we designed to enhance the interaction experience during a training. The positive obtained results helped us to derive some interaction design recommendations we believe will be a valid support for designers of future mobile systems conceived to be used in circumstances where there are limited possibilities of interaction
Everywhere Run: a Virtual Personal Trainer for Supporting People in their Running Activity
No full textMany medical researches, conducted on people from developed countries, have proved a strict correlation between some health diseases and a sedentary lifestyle.
Obesity and linked pathologies like diabetes and cardiovascular diseases are alarmingly becoming ever more common in rich societies. The most effective solution to these problems, as reported by the former studies, is a healthy diet regime together with a constant and monitored physical activity.
As a consequence, many research efforts have been carried on finding strategies for motivating people to exercise regularly.
In this paper, by taking advantage of the growing spread of mobile devices on a worldwide scale, we present an Android-based mobile application, called Everywhere Run, that aims at motivating and supporting people during their running activities. It behaves as a virtual personal trainer, assisting users during their run and helping them to stick to the right pace. In this way, users can fully focus on the run. Most important, Everywhere Run fosters the interaction between users and real personal trainers, in order to make it easy to non expert people to start working out in a healthy and safe way
Modeling real-time data and contextual information from workouts in eCoaching platforms to predict users’ sharing behavior on Facebook
No full texteCoaching platforms have become powerful tools to support users in their day-to-day physical routines. More and more research works show that motivational factors are strictly linked with the user inclination to share her fitness achievements on social media platforms. In this paper, we tackle the problem of analyzing and modeling users' contextual information and real-time training data by exploiting state-of-the-art classification algorithms, to predict if a user will share her current running workout on Facebook. By analyzing user's performance, collected by means of an eCoaching platform for runners, and crossing them with contextual information such as the weather, we are able to predict with a high accuracy if the user will post or not on Facebook. Given the positive impact that social media posts have in these scenarios, understanding what are the conditions that lead a user to post or not, can turn the output of the classification process into actionable knowledge. This knowledge can be exploited inside eCoaching platforms to model user behavior in broader and deeper ways, to develop novel forms of intervention and favor users' motivation on the long term
An e-coaching ecosystem: design and effectiveness analysis of the engagement of remote coaching on athletes
Full text linkNowadays, the use of mobile applications and wearable technologies to support and encourage an active lifestyle has become widespread. Several studies put in evidence that the usage of these kinds of support has to be monitored by high-qualified figures, to favor a safe and a long-term adherence to training routines. In order to investigate the impact of these professionals, this work sets out to provide an overview and an evaluation of an e-coaching ecosystem specifically designed for runners. The platform supports and guides people towards an active lifestyle by stimulating their motivation to exercise through the engagement provided by the interactions between users and human trainers. In this study, we investigate the effectiveness of the support offered by the human trainers and the engagement of the users. The results show that the support of human qualified trainers is crucial. Users tend to be more engaged to train when their trainings are developed and remotely supervised by a human coach. This has resulted in more workout sessions performed with respect to users exercising by following standard or self-made routines without direct professional supervision. Our findings show that e-coaching systems should develop their coaching protocols always taking into account the effectiveness of the support of qualified professionals over completely automated approaches
Assessing the User Experience Design as a Persuasive Methodology in a Real World Sport Application
No full textIn the last years, researchers are experimenting with innovative methodologies to help people in their daily training routines. Our research activity focuses on the study of the effects of the former technologies on people's sport habits. This work describes an experimentation conducted on Everywhere Run! (EWRun), a mobile application part of a bigger platform, that aims at helping people to stay active behaving like a virtual personal trainer. In this work we show some interesting results that arise from recent radical changes we made to the software usability and its graphical design. We observed a considerable increment of the user base and, as a consequence, of the total number of daily trainings. To statistically prove the effectiveness of the redesign, we decided to compare the two versions of the application. The results confirm its effectiveness in terms of usability and brought us to investigate how the new design is affecting user motivation by means of a custom questionnaire and a well known motivation assessment tool. The positive result observed will be the starting point of our forthcoming researches: we aim at further validating the results presented in this work over a longer period of time and over a larger number of real users
Everywhere run: a virtual personal trainer for supporting people in their running activity
No full textIn the last years many medical researches have reported an increase of health problems in developed countries, mostly related to a sedentary lifestyle (as obesity and linked pathologies like diabetes and cardiovascular diseases). As a consequence. many research efforts have been carried out for finding strategies for motivating people to exercise regularly.
In this paper we present an Android-based mobile application, called Everywhere Run [1], that aims at motivating and supporting people during their running activities, behaving as a virtual personal trainer. Everywhere Run fosters the interaction between users and real personal trainers, in order to make it easy to non expert people to start working out in a healthy and safe way
Recommendation in persuasive eHealth systems: An effective strategy to spot users' losing motivation to exercise
Full text linkPersuasive health technologies in the sport domain focus mostly on motivating and supporting people in reaching an active lifestyle. In this paper, we exploit a real-world dataset made available by a commercial persuasive ecosystem called u4fit. u4fit allows coaches to create tailored workout plans and to constantly monitor and support their sportsmen remotely. Occasional sportsmen often and suddenly abandon their workout routines, without giving any prior notice to the coach, frequently because of a decline in motivation. In this paper, we tackle this issue by developing an approach able to spot users' behavioral changes and predict if one will soon stop exercising. These predictions can be further elaborated and provided as a recommendation to the user's coach, to let her get in touch with the sportsmen and prevent such a situation. Experiments, validated through standard accuracy metrics, revealed that behavioral changes in training patterns represent one of the main markers that lead sportsmen to abandon
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