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BeWell: Sensing Sleep, Physical Activities and Social Interactions to Promote Wellbeing

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Abstract

Smartphone sensing and persuasive feedback design is enabling a new generation of wellbeing apps capable of automatically monitoring multiple aspects of physical and mental health. In this article, we present BeWell+ the next generation of the BeWell smartphone wellbeing app, which monitors user behavior along three health dimensions, namely sleep, physical activity, and social interaction. BeWell promotes improved behavioral patterns via feedback rendered as an ambient display on the smartphone’s wallpaper. With BeWell+, we introduce new mechanisms to address key limitations of the original BeWell app; specifically, (1) community adaptive wellbeing feedback, which generalizes to diverse user communities (e.g., elderly, children) by promoting better behavior yet remains realistic to the user’s lifestyle; and, (2) wellbeing adaptive energy allocation, which prioritizes monitoring fidelity and feedback responsiveness on specific health dimensions (e.g., sleep) where the user needs additional help. We evaluate BeWell+ with a 27 person, 19 day field trial. Our findings show that not only can BeWell+ operate successfully on consumer smartphones; but also users understand feedback and respond by taking steps towards leading healthier lifestyles.

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Notes

  1. BeWell+ is available for download and use with any off-the-shelf Android Smartphone. Please download BeWell+ from: http://www.bewellapp.org

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China

    Nicholas D. Lane

  2. Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, 03755, USA

    Mu Lin, Xiaochao Yang, Shahid Ali, Ethan Berke & Andrew T. Campbell

  3. Intel Lab, Santa Clara, CA, 95054, USA

    Hong Lu

  4. University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Giuseppe Cardone

  5. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA

    Afsaneh Doryab

  6. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14850, USA

    Mashfiqui Mohammod & Tanzeem Choudhury

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  1. Nicholas D. Lane
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  2. Mu Lin
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  3. Mashfiqui Mohammod
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  4. Xiaochao Yang
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  9. Ethan Berke
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Correspondence to Nicholas D. Lane.

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Lane, N.D., Lin, M., Mohammod, M. et al. BeWell: Sensing Sleep, Physical Activities and Social Interactions to Promote Wellbeing. Mobile Netw Appl 19, 345–359 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-013-0484-5

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