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Shakra: tracking and sharing daily activity levels with unaugmented mobile phones

Published: 01 March 2007 Publication History

Abstract

This paper explores the potential for use of an unaugmented commodity technology--the mobile phone-- as a health promotion tool. We describe a prototype application that tracks the daily exercise activities of people, using an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to analyse GSM cell signal strength and visibility to estimate a user's movement. In a short-term study of the prototype that shared activity information amongst groups of friends, we found that awareness encouraged reflection on, and increased motivation for, daily activity. The study raised concerns regarding the reliability of ANN-facilitated activity detection in the 'real world'. We describe some of the details of the pilot study and introduce a promising new approach to activity detection that has been developed in response to some of the issues raised by the pilot study, involving Hidden Markov Models (HMM), task modelling and unsupervised calibration. We conclude with our intended plans to develop the system further in order to carry out a longer-term clinical trial.

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Published In

cover image Mobile Networks and Applications
Mobile Networks and Applications  Volume 12, Issue 2-3
March 2007
114 pages

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Springer-Verlag

Berlin, Heidelberg

Publication History

Published: 01 March 2007

Author Tags

  1. activity recognition
  2. context aware
  3. daily activity levels
  4. mobile phones

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  • (2021)Scaling Up HCI Research: from Clinical Trials to Deployment in the Wild.Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411763.3443437(1-6)Online publication date: 8-May-2021
  • (2020)ShelfieACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/337953927:3(1-52)Online publication date: 31-May-2020
  • (2019)StimulightExtended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3290607.3313094(1-6)Online publication date: 2-May-2019
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