Everywhere Race!: A Social Mobile Platform for Sport Engagement and Motivation

摘要

A lot of medical researches demonstrate that in the last decades there has been a serious increase of chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes and correlated pathologies. These studies emphasize the key role of a healthy lifestyle in the prevention and cure of these kind of health problems. A healthy lifestyle can be broadly summarized in terms of regular physical activity, a balanced diet, a positive outlook and absence of harmful substances such as alcohol and tobacco. Researchers around the world are experimenting with new techniques and technologies to support and motivate people in their daily physical activity. Ubiquitous mobile devices and their intrinsic relationship with social networks are becoming one of the most popular persuasive technologies adopted in this research area. In this paper we present and evaluate an innovative mobile Android application, called Everywhere Race!, designed to motivate people in a wide range of speed-based sport activities. The peculiarity of the application consists in its groundbreaking way to engage people in sports. Thanks to an intensive usage of social networks and its fun-oriented design it makes it possible, for the first time ever, to compete in real-time with people from all over the world as in a real competition. A preliminary evaluation of the application, conducted on 35 users, shows that the application motivates both non-habitual sportsmen to start working out and habitual ones to keep on exercising.