Step up life: a context aware health assistant

Abstract

A recent trend in the popular health news is, reporting the dangers of prolonged inactivity in one's daily routine. The claims are wide in variety and aggressive in nature, linking a sedentary lifestyle with obesity and shortened lifespans [25]. Rather than enforcing an individual to perform a physical exercise for a predefined interval of time, we propose a design, implementation, and evaluation of a context aware health assistant system (called Step Up Life) that encourages a user to adopt a healthy life style by performing simple, and contextually suitable physical exercises. Step Up Life is a smart phone application which provides physical activity reminders to the user considering the practical constraints of the user by exploiting the context information like the user location, personal preferences, calendar events, time of the day and the weather [9]. A fully functional implementation of Step Up Life is evaluated by user studies.