Playful bottle: a mobile social persuasion system to motivate healthy water intake

  • Authors:

  • Meng-Chieh Chiu;Shih-Ping Chang;Yu-Chen Chang;Hao-Hua Chu;Cheryl Chia-Hui Chen;Fei-Hsiu Hsiao;Ju-Chun Ko

  • Affiliations:

  • National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan Roc;National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan Roc;National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan Roc;National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan Roc;National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan Roc;National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan Roc;National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan Roc

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Ubiquitous computing
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

This study of mobile persuasion system explores the use of a mobile phone, when attached to an everyday object used by an everyday behavior, becomes a tool to sense and influence that behavior. This mobile persuasion system, called Playful Bottle system, makes use of a mobile phone attached to an everyday drinking mug and motivates office workers to drink healthy quantities of water. A camera and accelerometer sensors in the phone are used to build a vision/motion-based water intake tracker to detect the amount and regularity of water consumed by the user. Additionally, the phone includes hydration games in which natural drinking actions are used as game input. Two hydration games are developed: a single-user TreeGame with automated computer reminders and a multi-user ForestGame with computer-mediated social reminders from members of the group playing the game. Results from 7-week user study with 16 test subjects suggest that both hydration games are effective for encouraging adequate and regular water intake by users. Additionally, results of this study suggest that adding social reminders to the hydration game is more effective than system reminders alone.