Increasing the Awareness of Daily Activity Levels with Pervasive Computing.

Public health promotion technology should be accessible to the general public at which it is aim ed. This paper explores the potential for use of an unaugmented co mmodity technology—the mobile phone—as a health promotion tool. We describe a prototype application that tracks the da ily exercise activities of people carrying phones, using fluctua tion in signal strength to estimate a user's movement. In a short- term study of the prototype that shared activity information amongst groups of friends, we found that awareness encouraged reflect ion on, and increased motivation for, daily activity. We descri be some of the details of the pilot study, and conclude with our i ntended plans to develop the system further in order to carry out a longer-term clinical trial.