Promoting Stretching Activity with Smartwatch - A Pilot Study
It has been claimed that wearable devices are useful for healthcare applications by providing functionalities such as idle alerts, pedometer, heart-rate measurement, and calorie calculation. However, these functionalities have the limitations of providing
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Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Suwon, Korea 2 Korea University, Seoul, Korea [email protected]
Abstract. It has been claimed that wearable devices are useful for healthcare applications by providing functionalities such as idle alerts, pedometer, heart-rate measurement, and calorie calculation. However, these functionalities have the limitations of providing only passive assistance. In order to prompt users to do physical activities, we developed a prototype application for active assistance, which works on smartwatch devices. It guides users to stretch their arms periodically during their daily lives. For effective guidance, we integrated motion recognition and gamification elements. We performed a user study to confirm the usefulness of our approach. Keywords: Smartwatch · Physical activity · Stretching · Motion recognition · Hidden Markov Model · Gamification
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Introduction
In recent years, the field of wearable technology has grown rapidly especially for wrist-worn devices such as smartbands and smartwatches. Since the devices are integrated with not only high-performance CPU and GPU but also accurate micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) sensors, it is possible to implement various services on user’s wrist, which include idle alerts, pedometers, exercise recording/management, and calorie monitoring, claiming to assist in healthcare. The medical community has reported that sedentary work over many hours can be very harmful to health [1,6]. It is generally recommended that workers do not remain in the same posture for long periods at the workplace [2,7], and the public have thus taken an interest in wearable devices that can help in this context. Such devices often adopt an idle alert function to tell users to move or change their posture. However, we believe it is difficult for these functionalities to effectively encourage physical activities. We call them passive assistance. In this paper, we propose an active assistance functionality that can effectively prompt the users physical activities. Promoting physical activities has mainly been studied from the perspective of games [3,5,8]. However, game activities have their own limitation that people c IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016 Published by Springer International Publishing AG 2016. All Rights Reserved G. Wallner et al. (Eds.): ICEC 2016, LNCS 9926, pp. 211–216, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-46100-7 19
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are made to get fully devoted to them in a certain place and for a certain period of time. Our approach presented in this paper aims at promoting physical activities using wearable devices in daily environments. We have developed a prototype application based on smartwatches. It prompts physical activity by informing the users that it is time to stretch, guiding and evaluating their motion, and providing feedbacks. Additionally, gamification elements are added to further motivate the users’ activities. Our approach is the first study to prompt physical activity and evaluate it using a wearable standalone device.
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