Designing Interactive Technology to Motivate Overweight People to Lose Weight by Doing Physical Activity
Year: 2017
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Nowadays, gaining inappropriate weight as being overweight has become a global issue. This problem was once only considered as a problem of rich people or for people from high-income countries, however, it is now affecting even low and middle-income countries particularly in the urban area. It is an issue that attracts the attention of many scientists and researchers. With the rapid advancement of technology, it is now widely used to contribute to finding solution to this problem. This thesis has as the main purpose to find the motivational needs of overweight people for doing physical activity and provide a prototype application with features to address those needs.\n\nDifferent methods were used from research to the design of the prototype. The literature review on motivational technology that supports people for physical activity was used. It was then followed by observation and face to face interview with potential users of the prototype. All the data collected were analyzed to find out what can motivate the overweight people to do physical activity. The motivational aspects found from observation and interview revealed some similarities with motivational aspects in the review of existing technology used to support physical activities. According to the results found in the literature review of existing technologies and the results from the user study, the overweight people are highly motivated by the social aspects. The technological solution presented as a contribution in this thesis strongly focused on sociability between people as a way of supporting the overweight to do physical activities.\n\nThe User Centered Design (UCD) was used from the early phase as the design method. This method was chosen due to its flexibility. It puts the users at the center of the whole work from collecting data to the evaluation of the design. The design of the prototype started by creating various scenarios and storyboard. A mock-up prototype application was designed with different social motivational features to demonstrate the concept. The prototype was tested with the potential users in order to get feedbacks and suggestion on how it can be improved.
Author: Alain-Victor Itangishaka
Language: English
Subfield: Human-Computer Interaction
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2593249902