Fitness Tour: a mobile application for combating obesity

Smartphones today not only provide computing and communication capabilities but are also equipped with many sensors that enable new applications across several domains, namely healthcare, environmental monitoring, social networks, and transportation. In this paper, we focus on the heathcare domain. We describe a location-based application called Fitness Tour that we have designed for Andorid-based smartphones. Our application includes several new features: (a) randomly generated exercise tours, (b) secure verification of any completed tour, and (c) social network interface that allows participating users to invite friends to view their records or participate in self-organized group competitions. This group feature allows users to exert social pressure on one another to adopt healthier lifestyle via outdoor physical activities. Our main goal is to use this application to encourage children and college students to adopt more active lifestyles and hence combat the obesity problem.