Step Up Life: A Context Aware Health Assistant Vijay Rajanna Sketch Recognition Lab Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering Texas A&M University vijayrajanna@tamu.edu Raniero Lara-Garduno Sketch Recognition Lab Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering Texas A&M University raniero@tamu.edu Dev Jyoti Behera Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering Texas A&M University devj1988@tamu.edu Karthic Madanagopal Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering Texas A&M University karthic11@tamu.edu Dr. Daniel Goldberg Sketch Recognition Lab Dept. of Geography Texas A&M University daniel.goldberg@tamu.edu Dr. Tracy Hammond Sketch Recognition Lab Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering Texas A&M University hammond@tamu.edu ABSTRACT A recent trend in the popular health news is, reporting the dangers of prolonged inactivity in one’s daily routine. The claims are wide in variety and aggressive in nature, link- ing a sedentary lifestyle with obesity and shortened lifespans [25]. Rather than enforcing an individual to perform a phys- ical exercise for a predefined interval of time, we propose a design, implementation, and evaluation of a context aware health assistant system (called Step Up Life) that encour- ages a user to adopt a healthy life style by performing simple, and contextually suitable physical exercises. Step Up Life is a smart phone application which provides physical activity reminders to the user considering the practical constraints of the user by exploiting the context information like the user location, personal preferences, calendar events, time of the day and the weather [9]. A fully functional implementation of Step Up Life is evaluated by user studies. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.1.2 [Information Systems]: User/Machine Systems— human factors, Human information processing. General Terms Algorithms, Design, Human Factors. Keywords Personal Health assistant, Context Aware Systems, Geo- graphic Information Systems, Public Health, Environmental Monitoring, Individual Health, HealthGIS, Sensors 1. INTRODUCTION Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. HealthGIS’14, November 04-07 2014, Dallas/Fort Worth, TX, USA Copyright 2014 ACM 978-1-4503-3136-4/14/11 ...$15.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2676629.2676636 The World Health Organization (WHO) has predicted that by 2015, approximately 2.3 billion adults will be overweight and more than 700 million will be obese [25]. A dramatic increase in sedentary lifestyles has invited a wide variety of associated health problems, and an equal focus in combat- ing these risks with the conveniently available technology has proliferated. While popular fitness tracking apps like Nike+, FitBit, and Map My Run aim to encourage a more active lifestyle, the vast majority of these solutions are signif- icantly wide in scope. These fitness-tracking apps track user activities and generate graphical reports to provide feedback to the user. Our approach is distinct from rest of the fitness tracking apps as we target the single most important aspect of a sedentary lifestyle - doing very brief physical activity after a prolonged interval of sitting-with a more personal- ized feedback loop through a smartphone’s standard set of sensors. In addition to promoting brief physical exercise after pro- longed periods of inactivity, we are also undertaking a study in how users respond to differing kinds of reminders. Our “reminders” are represented in the form of haptic vibrations from the user’s smartphone, brief but noticeable in dura- tion. We call these vibrations “nudges”, similar to an in- terpersonal interaction where one person nudges the other as a gentle reminder to perform a task. We seek to track a user’s response to varying amounts of nudges to perform brief physical activity. The timing, content, and nature of these nudges will be carefully considered and will likely be heavily overhauled multiple times during the course of the development of Step Up Life, as subtle changes in the way these nudges are communicated to a user can dramatically change the cognitive load and, ultimately, the overall user experience. We hypothesize that a brief, routine, and sub- tle approach to nudge a user to perform physical activity, and increasing the severity of these nudges if they are fre- quently ignored, will help significantly in establishing a habit of “taking a break” from prolonged inactivity, and encour- agement of the nudges and a minimalist user interface will significantly increase the activity level of a user’s daily rou- tine. The testing of our hypothesis is achievable because smartphones are easily capable of logging activity informa-