Paper Reading #23: Activity Awareness in Family-Based Healthy Living Online Social Networks

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Reference information
Authors: Stephen Kimani, Shlomo Berkovsky, Greg Smith, Jill Freyne, Nilufar Baghaei, Dipak Bhandari
When/Where: IUI’10, February 7–10, 2010, Hong Kong, China.

Summary
This paper discussed a social networking interface for activity awareness as a means to health management. The designers' research found that increased family interaction tends to encourage adopting a healthy lifestyle. The interface includes elements for two categories of healthy living activities, where they can record, track and view: online social activities using the system, and healthy living activities in the real world. Users are shown a scorecard, including charts and graphs of activity performance. A person's performance can be compared to others to encourage a higher level of learning and motivation. Each user has a self-reported diary to log activities in.

The user study focused on families of 4 members (2 parents and 2 children) who were familiar with online social networks. With a total of 368 participants from 92 families, participants were split into two groups, one without the activity awareness interface, one with. The study consisted of users completing questionnaires to identify their demographics (pre-interaction stage), interacting with the social network over a period of 3 weeks (interaction stage) and providing their experience with the interface (post-interaction stage). The study showed increased interaction with the system from the second group, as it provided easier access to health resources. Users in the second group were more able to learn about themselves to improve their health and lifestyles.

Discussion
I think this is an interesting and important line of study, as staying healthy, not just physically, can be key to wellbeing and happiness. In the past 50 years or so, it seems like many people are becoming more miserable or at least more dissatisfied with their lives. The results from the user study seem to speak for themselves, though I didn't get a good idea of how the system itself works. The explanation for the system performance was rather technical, and I was left wondering what the interface looked like and how people interacted with it.