Technologies Used
AndroidProject Team
About
Fitness trackers are wildly successful - the market exists but not everyone is interested in, or capable of setting goals and tracking motion to incentivize exercise. One group underserved by fitness trackers in particular are children. Children, to a great extent, lack the reasoning skills, discipline, and long term goal setting that adults require to best utilize fitness trackers. This issue is further compounded by the fact that childhood obesity is a growing epidemic - the rate has tripled amongst 6-19 year olds in the last 30 years and is now 18% of the population. Our solution is the gamification of fitness trackers to properly incentivize children to exercise. Teddy Run uses behavior-to-reward mechanisms tailored to chid psychology on the products children use most. From the start of the app, there is a intrinsic motivation to engage as there are mini-games which require no exercise to play (a pure reward). Once the user is "hooked", and has experienced their reward, there are many parts of the game that require the child to record a certain amount of steps on the pedometer to progress through the game. Additionally, necessary health and power ups that can only be attained via steps and exercise, further improve the game experience and reinforce healthy habits through practice. Lastly, there is a dynamic user interface, which requires cognitive effort to keep children engaged and minimize attrition. Ideally, this technology could easily interface with any smart pedometer on the market as the only input needed is the number of steps.
Comments
Sandeep Jain - 3171d
Robert Berkman - 3171d