Abstract: "Obesity has become an outstanding public health issue in most
countries around the world. Many attempts have been made to address
this issue that ranges from taking medication to doing exercise to follow-
ing a diet plan to playing games. Few approaches combine exercise and
game to engage the obese people in playing fun-based games or pur-
poseful games, also known as serious games, while monitoring their bio-
signals. However, existing work hardly provides a configurable, scalable
and context-aware serious game framework that can be used as a sup-
port for obesity treatment. In this paper, we take an attempt to propose
such a framework. The proposed framework facilitates bio-signal monitor-
ing based on body sensor network, context-awareness based on perva-
sive sensors, and on-the-spot activity recommendation based on current
game-playing context. It uses the cloud computing platform as infrastruc-
tural support that ensures the scalability of the framework. In order to
demonstrate the suitability of the proposed framework, we developed a
sample serious game; deploy it over a cloud platform; and experiment
with it by capturing some psycho-physical data while the obese are en-
gaged in game-play. We observed that the obese people were very much
engaged in game-play and they had positive experience using the system"
Abstract: "Adolescent obesity is an increasing challenge, and
pervasive social health games hold much promise for promoting
sustained healthy behaviors.
Researchers and d
esigners of
these
systems
have many potential theories and existing best practices
at their disposal.
Our study, grounded in participatory design,
shows which ones matter
-
both for pervasive social health games
and within the cultural context of a community
we studied over
the course of three years.
We worked with 112 US middle school
students from a lower
-
income community in a series of
participatory design exercises focused on social rewards for
everyday physical activity.
In our analysis, we
discuss
design
implications in four key areas
: social presence, gender effects,
incentives and competition. We show how these themes
manifested in students' designs and why they
were
particularly
important to our participa
nts. We then use
our findings to
suggest
design strategies for youth
-
focused pervasive social health
games."