Design and Development of a Healthy Lifestyle Tool for Mobile Devices

Abstract

According to World Health Organization the worldwide prevalence of obesity nearly doubled between 1980 and 2008, emphasizing its level of significance. Obesity is often resulting from a sedentary lifestyle, which is also often connected to depression, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, cancers etc. With modern technology we have new tools for handling these kind of issues. Mobile health (mHealth) is a field which is addressing issues related to health. Pre-experimental investigation indicate a strong correlation between mHealth tools and increased physical activity. In this thesis a mHealth tool has been developed using Design Science methodology. The application has been evaluated by both regular users and expert users in order to meet usability requirements. The system evaluation has reached satisfactory scores in terms of functionality and usability. In addition a field expert has provided her view on the potential to promote both physical and mental health using the app. It was possible to demonstrate that the app had a positive effect on the users and as well as the focus group in terms of promoting physical activity. User testing has also shown the appreciation of the various features such as social networking and route/activity creation. Due to the social nature of the features it could be expected that more ideas would be generated by new users and thus leading to new development iterations. The developed app is already a product available for free download. There is enough data collected by the app to document its good effect. Long term effect of the app has yet to be probed in a different setting and beyond the time and scope of this thesis. That will require resources and experts of other fields to work together. Future work suggests that one way would be to conduct a proper clinical trial.