Shakra: Sharing and Motivating Awareness of Everyday Activity

The increasing health problems of the western world underline the need to encourage daily exercise and activity. This paper explores the use of an unaugmented everyday device—the mobile phone—to support increased so- cialization around exercise and activity. We describe an application that tracks the daily exercise activities of people carrying phones, using fluctuation in sig- nal strength to estimate a user's movement. In evaluating the application that shared activity information amongst groups of friends, we found that awareness encouraged reflection on, and increased motivation for, daily activity. This ap- plication advances work on games and playful use of ubicomp technology, sup- porting enjoyable interactions that have secondary benefits. We describe some of the detail of the application's use, and discuss possibilities for future systems and studies.