GreenMed: A sustainable physical activity tracking application

Evidence suggests that physical activity brings substantial health benefits while its absence causes several health issues. As people become more aware of negative health outcomes associated with physical inactivity, the shift from sedentary lifestyles to healthier ones occurs, and physical activity tracking apps may help in this regard. While mobile applications for tracking physical activity are abundant, most of of them fail to deliver evidence-based recommendations. This is a major drawback especially when these apps are designed to guide users towards healthy lifestyles. This paper presents a prototype application that could provide evidence-based recommendations about how much physical activity adults should do to stay healthy according to the user’s current activity level. A new visualisation approach which uses animal representations for activity levels is also introduced to enhance user experience, increase motivation and create a good base for further integration of gamification principles. Early testing showed that users found the prototype very useful and expressed great interest towards the animal representations.

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