StretchArms: Promoting Stretching Exercise with a Smartwatch

Sang Bin Kim, Sin Jae Lee, Jung Hyun Han

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    15 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    A smartwatch is a wearable computer equipped with sensors. It can be used to provide fitness- or healthcare-related functionalities. This article presents three versions of a smartwatch application for prompting a user to stretch during the user’s daily life. The first version just reminds periodically the user that it is time to stretch and then guides the stretching motion. In contrast, the second version evaluates how correctly the stretching motion is made and provides success/fail feedback for the user. The third version adds gamification elements to the second version. With these three versions, an elaborate user study was performed with 42 participants. The results show that the reminders were effective in relaxing the mental/muscular tension of the users and the motion evaluation feedback encouraged the users to stretch more. In contrast, the effectiveness of gamification was not proven. This is the first study to prompt stretching exercise and evaluate it with a smartwatch. It can help develop effective healthcare applications on wearable devices.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)218-225
    Number of pages8
    JournalInternational Journal of Human-Computer Interaction
    Volume34
    Issue number3
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2018 Mar 4

    Bibliographical note

    Funding Information:
    This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea(NRF) grant funded by the Korea government(MSIP) (No. NRF-2016R1A2B3014319).

    Publisher Copyright:
    © 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Human Factors and Ergonomics
    • Human-Computer Interaction
    • Computer Science Applications

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