Mobile apps for stimulating healthy life: walky doggy reference example

• Main Authors: Denis Laure, Oleg Medvedev, Sergey Balandin, Ksenia Lagutina
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: FRUCT 2015-04-01
• Series: Proceedings of the XXth Conference of Open Innovations Association FRUCT
• Subjects: physical activity; motivation; regular walking; dog walking
• Online Access: https://www.fruct.org/publications/fruct17/files/Lau.pdf

Lack of physical activity leads to such diseases as diabetes, stroke, osteoarthritis and other noncommunicable diseases. Therefore, it is very important to stimulate physical activity. One of the simplest types of physical activity is walking on regular basis. It was shown that regular walking allows to reduce the risk of different diseases and disabilities, has positive effect on immune system, emotional status and quality of life. One of the possible approaches to motivate people to go walking is dog walking. The fact that the dog needs to be walked everyday at the same time periods makes dog walking a good and effective sort of physical activity. However, acquiring a dog brings some restrictions in the dog owner's life and requires the owner to take care and responsibility of the dog. These restrictions can be overcome with a mobile applications that emulate dog's need for a walk provoking user to go walking. Moreover, such kind of application can be very useful for other use cases. For example, in a case when a kid asks his or her parents to acquire a dog and parents want to be sure that their kid will take care and responsibility for that.