Go Run Go: An Android Game-Story Application for Aiding Motivation to Exercise

Abstract

A sedentary lifestyle without proper and sufficient exercises is an unhealthy behavior that can lead to obesity and other chronic diseases. People who realize the danger of this behavior are normally reluctant to change because of their long-established habitude and lack of motivation. An approach that has been successfully applied for encouraging people to initiate their exercise routine or perform a more physical activity is the use of exergame. Go Run Go, presented in this paper, is a smartphone-based exergame designed for motivating people to go out and exercise more through the use of an original, user-friendly game story and activity-energy expenditure information. The application utilizes acceleration data on the Y-axis of the smartphone to build a decision tree classification model for distinguishing three types of activity: walking, running, and inactive. Finally, time spent on each activity is recorded and used for computing the number of calories burned on the activity, which is then displayed to the user on the smartphone screen. The experimental results demonstrate that performance of Go Run Go is very satisfactory in both quantitative and qualitative measures. © 2015 IEEE.