Promoting Stretching Activity with Smartwatch - A Pilot Study

It has been claimed that wearable devices are useful for healthcare applications by providing functionalities such as idle alerts, pedometer, heart-rate measurement, and calorie calculation. However, these functionalities have the limitations of providing only passive assistance. In order to prompt users to do physical activities, we developed a prototype application for active assistance, which works on smartwatch devices. It guides users to stretch their arms periodically during their daily lives. For effective guidance, we integrated motion recognition and gamification elements. We performed a user study to confirm the usefulness of our approach.