WalkThisWei
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Retirement is a transition phase in life where one typically becomes more conscious of maintaining one’s health, both physically and mentally. It entails also often less day-to-day interaction with other people associated with one’s work. These factors create a pressing need for recent retirees to keep physically and mentally active, and at the same time, stay socially engaged. A health and fitness device designed specifically for older adults, which addresses their needs in retirement, has a huge opportunity for success in long-term engagement. We propose WalkThisWei, a 'social story walking system'. WalkThisWei delivers audio content at specific landmarks while one walks, narrating a story that is related to one’s actual location by the matching of some common landmarks – such as a park, theater or railway station. In addition, the system has a ‘social connections’ feature that encourages users to interact and connect with other individuals using the system, with the aim of helping them form social connections to walk together. The system has two components: a wearable speaker and a smartphone app. The app provides location-based stories and provides an interface for the user to manage his/her story walk. The wearable clip-on speaker complements the functions of the app to foster social engagement and not burden the user with using the phone while walking. The device also implements the social connections function, vibrating and lighting up in the vicinity of other users, to prompt spontaneous conversation among nearby walkers. The key objective of integrating physical activity and social interaction in one device is to motivate users to be active through social interaction, and vice-versa, forming a virtuous cycle of physical and social well-being. Stories that share features with one's location provide the user with an immersive experience and encourage the user to explore and appreciate one's surroundings as the story unfolds. A breadth of story types, featuring informational or fictional content, serve to engage the walker mentally. By linking the user’s walking progress to the development of a story, the cold data of one's distance or step count is abstracted away behind an entity that makes the exercise perceptible, enjoyable and perhaps most importantly, sociable. This project was carried out in response to a prompt from FutureWei, American subsidiary of Huawei, to design the user experience of the next generation in sporting and health products with a focus on improving user loyalty.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | June 2017 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Berecz, Georg |
|---|---|
| Author | Brauer, Janos |
| Author | Chen, Xiyuan |
| Author | Deschamps, Daniela |
| Author | Detje, Stephan |
| Author | Motwani, Dipti |
| Author | Xu, Jingqi |
| Sponsor | Huawei Technologies Co. |
| Advisor | Aldaz, Gabriel |
Subjects
| Subject | Mechanical Engineering |
|---|---|
| Subject | Product Design |
| Subject | Wearables |
| Subject | Health and Fitness |
| Subject | Smart Decives |
| Subject | Retirement |
| Subject | Smartphone application |
| Genre | Student project report |
Bibliographic information
Access conditions
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- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Berecz, Georg and Brauer, Janos and Chen, Xiyuan and Deschamps, Daniela and Detje, Stephan and Motwani, Dipti and Xu, Jingqi and Aldaz, Gabriel. (2017). WalkThisWei. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/tb756jg0064
Collection
ME310 Project Based Engineering Design
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- engreference@stanford.edu
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