Persuasive Mobile Systems Design to Help People be Physically Active

This PhD thesis puts forward the results of research activities I have carried out at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Cagliari since March 2011. My work can be placed in the general field of Human-Computer Interaction and, more precisely, in the relative new and trending area of Persuasive Computing. Broadly speaking, a persuasive system is a system designed to change some habits or behaviors of the users by means of persuasion. My research activity sets out to address fundamental questions related to the application of mobile persuasive technologies to real-life problems, including: Are mobile technologies able to persuade people to a more physically active lifestyle? Are currently available systems actually effective? How can user experience design be improved in this class of softwares? How can human to device interaction be improved to favor users during their physical activities? Are these systems really effective over long time periods? The research activity this thesis presents, aimed at answering at previous questions through the study of the effects of mobile persuasive systems designed to foster people to a more active lifestyle. In literature, we can find many examples of prototypal persuasive mobile system. The results they reported are encouraging but, almost always, they are deducted from qualitative studies over short periods of time. This work endeavors to overcome these limitations through the development of a real world complex software platform designed to encourage people to a more active lifestyle. Users interact with the platform mainly through two Android-based applications freely available on the market. Thanks to our platform, our experimentations can rely on a conspicuous base of real users and a huge amount of automatically recorded statistics for potentially unlimited periods of time

Dense nanocrystalline W alloys: Enhancement of hardness and thermal stability by Al addition

Nanocrystalline W100-xAlx (x up to 20 at.%) powders obtained by mechanical alloying have been consolidated by spark plasma sintering (SPS). Alloying W with Al significantly improves the sinterability, allowing the fabrication of dense samples. The consolidation process keeps the nanocrystalline microstructure substantially unaffected, which contributes to the hardness of the final W-Al alloys. The room-temperature nano-and micro-hardness of dense W80Al20 alloy sintered at 1100 degrees C are as high as 18 and 14 GPa, respectively. These values are significantly higher than those previously reported for pure coarse-or submicron-grained W and may be ultimately ascribed to the grain boundary segregation of Al

Role of nitric oxide in glioblastoma therapy: another step to resolve the terrible puzzle?

Glioblastoma Multiforme, the most common and aggressive primary brain tumor, remains incurable despite of the advent of modern surgical and medical treatments. This poor prognosis depends by the recurrence after surgery and intrinsic or acquired resistance to chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Nitric oxide is a small molecule that plays a key roles in glioma pathophysiology. Many researches showing that NO is involved in induction of apoptosis, radiosensitization and chemosensitization. Therefore, NO role, if clarified, may improve the knowledge about this unsolved puzzle called GBM

RFID systems for risk reduction in blood bags: a cost-benefit analysis

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology has gained increasing popularity in recent years, both in the field of industrial application and in the services sector. In the latter field, in particular, many applications in the area of hospital logistics have been recently developed. This paper concerns the application of RFID systems to the control of blood bags in hospitals. The work, focused on the economic aspects of the problem, is based on a model for the economic evaluation of RFID systems based on cost / benefit analysis. Both cases of application of HF and UHF frequencies, and different application scenarios were taken into account, based on the use of RFID in the entire transfusion loop or only to the part of it relative to the end user. The model was then tested and applied to an actual hospital reality of considerable importance from the point of view of blood transfusion. The results obtained in the different test cases were then further analysed through a sensitivity analysis in order to assess the model's response to changes in input parameters

Design Guidelines for an Enhanced Interaction Experience in the Domain of Smartphone-Based Applications for Sport and Fitness

Nowadays, several research studies point up that an active lifestyle is essential for physical and mental health benefits. Mobile phones have greatly influenced people’s habits and attitudes also in the way they exercise. Our research work is mainly focused on investigating how to exploit mobile technologies to favour people’s exertion experience. To this end, we developed an exertion framework users can exploit through a real world mobile application, called BLINDED, designed to act as a virtual personal trainer to support runners during their trainings. In this work, inspired by both previous findings in the field of interaction design for people with visual impairments, feedback gathered from real users of our framework, and positive results obtained from two experimentations, we present some new interaction facilities we designed to enhance the interaction experience during a training. The positive obtained results helped us to derive some interaction design recommendations we believe will be a valid support for designers of future mobile systems conceived to be used in circumstances where there are limited possibilities of interaction

An e-coaching ecosystem: design and effectiveness analysis of the engagement of remote coaching on athletes

Nowadays, the use of mobile applications and wearable technologies to support and encourage an active lifestyle has become widespread. Several studies put in evidence that the usage of these kinds of support has to be monitored by high-qualified figures, to favor a safe and a long-term adherence to training routines. In order to investigate the impact of these professionals, this work sets out to provide an overview and an evaluation of an e-coaching ecosystem specifically designed for runners. The platform supports and guides people towards an active lifestyle by stimulating their motivation to exercise through the engagement provided by the interactions between users and human trainers. In this study, we investigate the effectiveness of the support offered by the human trainers and the engagement of the users. The results show that the support of human qualified trainers is crucial. Users tend to be more engaged to train when their trainings are developed and remotely supervised by a human coach. This has resulted in more workout sessions performed with respect to users exercising by following standard or self-made routines without direct professional supervision. Our findings show that e-coaching systems should develop their coaching protocols always taking into account the effectiveness of the support of qualified professionals over completely automated approaches

Everywhere run: a virtual personal trainer for supporting people in their running activity

In the last years many medical researches have reported an increase of health problems in developed countries, mostly related to a sedentary lifestyle (as obesity and linked pathologies like diabetes and cardiovascular diseases). As a consequence. many research efforts have been carried out for finding strategies for motivating people to exercise regularly. In this paper we present an Android-based mobile application, called Everywhere Run [1], that aims at motivating and supporting people during their running activities, behaving as a virtual personal trainer. Everywhere Run fosters the interaction between users and real personal trainers, in order to make it easy to non expert people to start working out in a healthy and safe way