Sustainability of GreenMed: A physical activity monitoring application

Abstract

Evidence suggests that physical activity brings substantial health benefits while its absence causes several health issues. As people become more aware of the negative health outcomes associated with physical inactivity, the shift from sedentary lifestyles to healthier ones occurs, and physical activity tracking apps may help in this regard. While mobile applications for tracking physical activity are abundant, most of them fail to deliver evidence-based recommendations. This is a major drawback especially when these apps are designed to guide users towards healthy lifestyles. This thesis presents a prototype application that (1) keeps track of physical activities, (2) visualizes this data to the user and (3) provides evidence-based recommendations according to user’s current activity level. Additionally, a new visualization approach is proposed which uses animal representations for activity levels in order to enhance user’s experience, increase motivation and create a good base for further integration of gamification principles. Test users found the prototype useful and showed great interest towards the animal representations.