System design for mobile exergame to engage physical activity

Abstract

© 2015 IEEE. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that people around the world are in the situation of physical inactivity which mainly causes non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Due to this, people around the world are aware of the importance of exercise. Walking is considered to be one of the cheapest and easiest ways to exercise. To be fully beneficial from walking, the number of steps must be more than 10,000 steps/day. Even though it is easy to walk, people still find walking boring and lack motivation to make it into habit. As a result, various studies have tried to deploy persuasive applications, but these applications are not yet convincing enough because of the lack of fun factor. One possible solutions is to integrate digital gaming in exercise, called Exergaming. To design such games, three main factors need to be considered which are a fun factor, the increase of a physical activity level, and technologies used. Legendary Crystal is proposed as a 2D puzzle RPG game which motivates players to enjoy their walking exercise with appropriate technologies. Legendary Crystal gives walking quests to players, and once they achieve each quest they will be rewarded with items that can be used in the game. In order to calculate the caloric expenditure of each player, the data from mobiles' accelerometers will first be gathered and changed to the number of steps. These numbers of steps will be later converted into the amount of caloric expenditure. Legendary Crystal is developed on the Android platform with the use of the Unity game engine. Both the game data and the player information are kept locally except from the registration of the players which is maintained on Microsoft Azure for further expansion. In conclusion, Legendary Crystal provides benefits which are not only for enjoyment, but also for good health.