Requirements, design and pilot study of a physical activity activation system using virtual communities

Abstract

Increasing researches support the importance of physical activity in maintaining health and preventing from diseases. Nowadays, researchers from different disciplines and health organizations are putting a lot of effort on interventions and strategies to increase the motivation of people in being more physically active. Following the same incentive, we introduce a novel system “ICT-based Community Coaching” as a strategy to motivate people to be physically active. It is a strategy based on human-to-human feedback where we transform the physical activity into a social activity. As the system is a new approach we focused on the elicitation of the requirements. In order to elicit the requirements of this system, we elaborated a scenario in order to make explicit the ideas of the Community Coaching system. Then we elaborated a questionnaire to be able to define important functionalities that can be useful for potential users.