Reducing adolescent obesity with a social networking mobile fitness application

Abstract

We present the results of the third phase in a three part study developing an application to reduce obesity levels in adolescents with a mobile fitness application that encourages youth to engage in fitness activity by providing social networking tools to facilitate motivation. In the first phase, we studied effecting positive attitudinal changes towards fitness. The second phase studied physical improvements with the application in our target group. This third phase tests the efficacy of the socialization tools in our application for motivating both positive attitudinal changes and physical improvements towards fitness. The application contained thirteen distinct exercises that subjects could engage in using sensors on the mobile devices to unbiasedly measure progress. The socialization tools to encourage fitness engagement allowed for such activities as friending, sharing progress and collaboratively exercising with friends either in person or remotely. The study participants were adolescents age 14 to 15 with 20 subjects in an experimental group that used the fitness application and 15 control subjects that did not. The study ran for eight weeks with the results indicating both positive attitude changes towards fitness exercises and body-mass index (BMI) improvements in fitness levels correlated to socialization interests/activities for the subjects using the application, while the control group showed no such correlation of fitness level improvement.