Lamia Elloumi

Physical Activity Support Community TogetherActive

Reducing sedentary lifestyle and physical inactivity is getting an increased attention of researchers and health organizations due to its significant benefits on health. In the same direction we are proposing a virtual community system, TogetherActive, which supports people in their daily physical activity. The community is connected to physical activity sensors and provide social support (informational, emotional, instrumental and appraisal supports). In order to increase motivation, individual and group goals, comparison, competition and cooperation are the key concepts considered in the system. This paper presents the design, implementation and usability evaluation of the TogetherActive system.

Towards physical activity support community

Nowadays it is recognized that physical activity, besides other lifestyles, has indisputable beneficial affects on cardiovascular diseases prevention and treatment. Additionally the social support is important and has a valuable impact on the outcomes in cardiovascular disease patients. To provide the patients the social support needed and, to support and motivate them in their daily physical activity, we are working on building a mobile virtual community for physical activity support connected to a triaxial accelerometer, where the physical activity will be monitored and the main objective will be to motivate and support the patients to be adequately physically active. In this paper, the main functionalities supported by the community are discussed and the instrumental support is also investigated and metrics, based on the IMA metric, are proposed.

Requirements, Design and Pilot Study of a Physical Activity Activation System Using Virtual Communities

Increasing researches support the importance of physical activity in maintaining health and preventing from diseases. Nowadays, researchers from different disciplines and health organizations are putting a lot of effort on interventions and strategies to increase the motivation of people in being more physically active. Following the same incentive, we introduce a novel system “ICT-based Community Coaching” as a strategy to motivate people to be physically active. It is a strategy based on human-to-human feedback where we transform the physical activity into a social activity. As the system is a new approach we focused on the elicitation of the requirements. In order to elicit the requirements of this system, we elaborated a scenario in order to make explicit the ideas of the Community Coaching system. Then we elaborated a questionnaire to be able to define important functionalities that can be useful for potential users.

ICT-mediated Community Coaching to Improve Physical Activity

It is commonly known that physical activity is important to maintain health and prevent diseases. Many physical activity interventions have been developed to motivate people to be more physically active. Existing ICT-based interventions provide system-to-human feedback as a motivational strategy to be more physically active. In this paper we propose the ICT-mediated Community Coaching functionality as a novel motivational strategy based on human-to-human feedback where we transform the physical activity into a social activity. This paper presents the requirement elicitation, the design and implementation, and the evaluation of the Community Coaching system for physical activity.

TogetherActive - Key Concepts and Usability Study

Despite the well-known benefits of physical activity on health, the recommended level of physical activity is not reached by everyone. Many interventions are aimed at reducing sedentary behaviour and increasing physical activity. As an intervention, we developed a virtual community system, TogetherActive, aiming at providing the social support to people in their daily life. Typically, virtual communities provide emotional and/or informational support, but our contribution aims mainly the instrumental and appraisal support. The community is coupled with physical activity sensor. In this system we focused on concepts such as individual and group goals, comparison, competition and cooperation in order to increase motivation to meet the daily recommended physical activity level. In this paper presents the design and the key concepts of the TogetherActive system, its implementation and the usability study.

Towards Delivering Disease Support Processes for Patient Empowerment Using Mobile Virtual Communities

In existing healthcare systems, the focus is on clinical processes to assess the health condition of patients, making clinical decisions and applying therapeutic procedures all under control of health professionals. However, patients with chronic diseases usually face many disease related problems that are not immediately under control or supervision of a health professional. Taking patients with chronic cardiovascular diseases as an example, these patients are recommended to make a number of lifestyle changes: increase physical activity, change diet habits, quit smoking and adhere to a medication intake regime. In this paper we propose the use of Mobile Virtual Communities to enhance the empowerment of patients by providing the ICT mediated social support functionalities that assist patients to realize the lifestyle changes needed.