Paper Reading #18: Activity Awareness

Comments:

Adam Friedli

Alyssa Nabors

Reference Information:

Title: Activity Awareness in Family-Based Healthy Living Online Social Networks

Author: S. Kimani, S. Berkovsky, G. Smith, J. Freyne, N. Baghaei, D. Bhanari.

Presentation: (Conference Presentation) IUI'10. February 7-10, 2010, Hong Kong, China

Summary: In this paper, the authors describe an activity awareness user interface combined with a social network system. They believe that social relationships and family involvement can improve the family members' health management techniques. Thus, they developed a system where more interaction between family memebers' can be achieved and where each one can track and access tools relating to their healthy living activities.

The social network system is structured for families, where a community has many member families. The Activity Awareness Interface allows them to interact online noting their healthy activities in interactions such as forum posting, an activity diary and a blog. Their activity diary is where individuals can write about their real world healthy living activities. Each activity recorded in the diary can be later display as a report card with graphs about their performance, as well as their social interaction performance. 

In order to evaluate the system, a user study was carried out. They were measuring how the Activity Awareness Interface contributed to the healthy living in contrast to just the family-oriented healthy living social network. They targeted families of 4, two parents and 2 children. Part of the families utilized the social network on its own, while the rest used the social network along with the activity awareness interface.  

Their studies where divided into three stages, pre interaction, interaction, and post interaction. In the pre-interaction stage, participants where introduced to the system. In the interaction stage, participants utilized the system for 3 weeks, and in the post interaction stage participants filled out experience questionnaires.

Overall they noted the benefits of using both system together, instead of just the social network.

Discussion:

I think that this is definitively an innovative way to help families maintain healthy lives. However, I do not think the paper was really information as it could have been. I would have liked seeing more explanation about how the social network worked, and how it interacted with the interface. In the study they mentioned how they compared the effectiveness of the interface comparing it against the results obtained from the families using the social network only. However, they did not explain what features were available in the social network and how that would also help them maintain a healthy life.