Paper Reading #23 - Activity Awareness in Family-Based Healthy Living Online Social Networks

Comments

Shena

Paola

Reference

Activity Awareness in Family-Based Healthy Living Online Social Networks

Stephen Kimani, Shlomo Berkovsky, Greg Smith, Jill Freyne, Nilufar Baghaet, Dipak Bhandari

IUI 2010 - Hong Kong

Summary

This work focuses on using social networking features to supply users with an awareness of healthy activities which are taking place around them. The basic idea is that surrounding yourself with news of other people’s healthy activities will inspire you yourself to be healthy. To study this, families of 4 were given access to a social networking tool that either did or did not support activity awareness. At the end of the study period both groups were evaluated to determine the effectiveness of the activity awareness feature. The results indicated that users with access to the activity awareness feature were more motivated to be active and more aware of their health.

Analysis

This paper illustrates that what we know to be true in the real world about activity awareness also applies in social networking situations. Personally, I do not find any real world potential for this idea. I think at best it will have a niche group (people interested in physical fitness) as regular users. I am uncertain of the study’s design, and feel that any feature presented could have had the same effect. For example, replace physical fitness with recently watched movies and you would probably observe that one group had better awareness of their friends recently watched movies. Overall I don’t find much of a contribution in this paper.