World of Workout: A Mobile RPG for encouraging healthy habits

Citation

J. Bartley, J. Forsyth, G. Brown, P. Hagseth, D. W. Goldberg, and T. Hammond, “World of Workout : A Contextual Mobile RPG to Encourage Long Term Fitness Categories and Subject Descriptors,” pp. 60–67, 2013.

Link: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2535718

With more and more people spending more time on internet, mobiles and their laptops, their lifestyle is becoming increasingly sedentary. With this, there's more need of healthy lifestyle by encouraging them to do exercises. However, we often tend not to do things for which we don't see the tangible rewards. The authors of this paper came up with the novel idea of addressing exactly the same problem. They developed a Mobile RPG (Role-playing game) where the character would get evolved with the exercises performed by the user in reality. To achieve the same, this paper employed the use of Activity Recognition. This paper mainly discusses the architecture and design principles for developing such a game.

Architecture

1. Client-Server Architecture: Data recorded using User's smartphone (Accelerometer data) and pushed to Server
2. HTTP being used to send the data
3. Database used as Information Repository

Design Principles

1. The game mainly recorded the data using GPS and Accelerometer present in the user's smartphone,
2. The activities were divided into two categories: Stationary and Moving
3. For every exercise performed, system would reward the user by giving more powers to the character,
4. The variety of real world exercises were combined into 3 game attributes:
1. Strength
2. Stamina
3. Speed
5. It also incorporated the Fatigue Factor. Its levels were quantified and was used as indicator to discourage user to over-exercising and thus, preventing them from hurting themselves.

Thoughts and Future Research Ideas:

This is a beautiful and innovative idea to encourage users to perform exercises and stay fit. Technically this is an application from the domain of Activity Recognition which also interests me. It finds the use of various Machine Learning Algorithms. With IoT (Internet of Things) and Human-Wearable Computing gaining more relevance day-by-day, its uses and applications can explored/exploited in those domains as well.