Archive for February, 2012
Fitsquare – a foursquare app that guides you towards a healthy, balanced lifestyle
Feb 29th
fitsquare is a research project undertaken by Sam Smith (final year computer science student at the University of Lincoln) which sends users real-time messages in order to encourage them to check in to healthy venues on foursquare. They can also earn exclusive badges, compete against friends and track progress. Plus it’s completely free to participate!
Sam is currently looking for volunteer participants, anybody who uses foursquare on a regular basis is more than welcome to sign up. Participation in this research project involves connecting your foursquare account with fitsquare and you will also be expected to actively check-in on foursquare on a regular basis. You are also encouraged to take advantage of the fitsquare social, competition and tracking features made available from the web application.
According to the World Health Organisation, physical inactivity is the fourth highest risk factor for global mortality, accounting for 6% of deaths around the world. fitsquare attempts to increase physical activity for users of the foursquare social network by using persuasive technology to encourage positive behaviour change.
If you are interested in research in health in social media or persuasive technology then please do visit fitsquare to find out more about the research project and to get involved. Also if you have any questions about the project then please do email mail @ fitplusapp dot com
Here are some screenshots showing fitsquare and the main features in action…
Receive realtime persuasive messages via Twitter or email when you check in using foursquare. Great for keeping you motivated to exercise & stay healthy!
Race against your foursquare friends and other fitsquare users to climb to the top of the leaderboards. And be the first to earn exclusive fitsquare badges!
View your check-in history from your wall, log your progress and send messages to your friends. Comment, like and dislike wall posts to let your friends know what you think of their check-ins!
Track your progress with detailed line graphs, bar charts and pie charts. Find out how healthy your check-ins are.
LiSC are hosting a Windows Phone Camp
Feb 10th
Last September we developed a new module for year 3 and MComp students within the School of Computer Science at Lincoln called ‘Social Applications Development’. As the name entails, the module is about the design and implementation of social applications, on mobile platforms, with content that sits at the core of LiSC’s research concepts. With students enrolled on the module from different degree programmes with a diverse range of programming skills we carefully considered the different mobile platforms out there for developing social apps on. The most popular of course are the iPhone and Android platforms, however we considered the barriers to developing for these platforms too high given the range of development skills the enrolled students had. To this end we chose the emerging Windows Phone platform which offered comparable hardware and application development opportunities to both Android and iPhone. The clincher was the ease of developing for Windows Phone (over Android and iPhone) and the familiarity of Visual Studio for most of the students. Fast forward 6 months and the student feedback on the module has been very positive, despite some initial resistance at the beginning in the choice of platform, most students now agree it is a good platform to develop for. The legacy of the previous ‘Windows Mobile’ operating system is something that may be difficult to entirely shake off for Microsoft – Windows Phone is an entirely new mobile OS, built from the ground up for contemporary digital lifestyles and takes nothing from previous Windows Mobile platforms.
To further enhance the students experience of the module we are hosting a Windows Phone workshop with Microsoft on Wednesday March 7th @1pm-5pm – by registering and coming along you could be in with a chance to win a brand new Nokia Lumia 800 on the day! The event will take place in the Lincoln School of Computer Science in room MC3204 (Comp Lab B), and will include presentations by Microsoft on Windows Phone followed by a coding session then finishing the day off with pizza. If you are interested (you don’t have to be enrolled on the Social Applications Development module) then it would be helpful to familiarise yourself with developing for Windows Phone using Visual Studio 2010 and the ‘Mango’ SDK, by doing so you will get more out of the workshop. All machines in room MC3204 are installed with the prerequisite tools if you want to get a head start!
My first and last blog post
Feb 1st
Hi! I am Sanne Verbaan, a third year Human Technology student from the Netherlands. I have been an intern at LiSC for the last 5 months and today is my last day. So hi and bye!
Most of you who read this will not know what Human Technology is. Human Technology deals with all kinds of human-technology interaction and tries to enhance user-friendly interfaces. I will eventually become a ‘soft’ engineer, mainly interested in human factors and behaviour, but with enough technical education to be able to communicate with developers/designers. I’ve been taught from basic usability studies to broad investigations on the societal demands on technological innovations. The focus is on ICT, building environment and product design. As an HT-engineer I know that the situations in which technicians design a product, service or interface are pretty complex. At the end of my study I will not only know how the end users think, but also how the designers think and how those minds can be brought together.
During my time at LiSC I assisted in the ENACT, Eat,Cook,Grow and KillaWhatts project. In the ENACT project I worked together with Shaun Lawson, Conor Linehan, Sue Jamison-Powell and Andy Garbett. The goal of this project is to set up a new way of Computerized Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for people suffering from insomnia.My work in the ENACT project involved the set up of the usability testing for the mobile phone application. The usability trials are still running at the moment.
In Eat,Cook,Grow I worked together with Shaun Lawson and Jaz Choi from the Queensland University in Australia. Eat,Cook,Grow is a project on sustainable food. The main goal of the is toraise people’s awareness of healthy and ecological food options with nutritional data and educational information. Shaun and I were in charge of recruiting participants for the website I8Dat and the focus group. Together with Jaz we had a really interesting focus group, and the analyses showed lots of usable data.When I am back in The Hague, I will run the I8Dat trial in The Netherlands!
Killawhats is a project on energy usage in student courts on the Lincoln University Campus. The goal of the project is to reduce the amount of energy students use by introducing the students of various courts with a Facebook application that monitors the energy usage per court.On this project I worked together with Derek Foster. Originally I was going to be in charge of the recruitment and the focus group, but the project got postponed.
I also worked on a literature review oncognitive behavioral therapy for people suffering from posttraumatic stress syndrome after sexual abuse and what the possibilities and requirements are to set up an online group cognitive behavioral therapy.
I want to thank everyone in LiSC, I had a really great time and would love to come back when I finish Human Technology.
