Social interaction around diet applications: An initial study

Abstract

As being threatened by overweight and obesity, more and more people start thinking how to change the way they eat. However, less evidence shows current diet-related applications really work and current design mainly focuses on nutrition value and are not tailored to specific person. In this paper, we try to learn from social science to investigate two popular diet products' forums to see what social interaction happens and what elements related to those social interaction. Then we find out contextual information and emotion are related to social conversation on forum which help people find similar buddies to solve problem and validate opinions and understandings. We argue we should take into account those information and social interaction in our future design to better support diet. © 2011 ICST.