Spaceship Launch

Abstract

Parents play a critical role in facilitating children's physical activity, as they are an important source of modeling and support. While Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers have explored exergame design for children or adults separately, an important open area of work is identifying design guidelines for family exergames. One question that researchers have increasingly posed is, how can exergames be designed to avoid potential negative consequences of competition? To address these questions we designed Spaceship Launch, an exergame for parents and kids in lower income neighborhoods, where obesity is most prevalent. We describe our iterative design process: the formative study to identify design opportunities, our resulting system, and our field evaluation of the tool. Our findings highlight the impact of SL on physical activity intentions, and how parental preferences for in-game competition were aligned with the psychological needs of relatedness and competence. We conclude with design recommendations for future family-focused exergames.

From Personal Informatics to Family Informatics

“…Diet is heavily shaped by family, motivating work by Grimes et al [25] to explore opportunities to support family diet and by Schaefbauer et al [66] in SnackBuddy, a mobile application to help caregivers and children monitor their snacks. For physical activity, Saksono et al [64] examined encouraging physical activity by creating exergames that focused on families. Last, Colineau [8,9] and Kimani [37] thought to support family wellbeing through online family portals and social networks.…”

“…Tracking tools for families may benefit from improved approaches to automating tracking in times and contexts when tracking will be a lower priority. In previous work, leveraging shared experiences within a family can lower the barriers to tracking diet [25,66] and physical activity [64] as well as reflecting on health goals [8]. Designing for families can lower barriers to tracking by leveraging shared experiences and having family members track on behalf of each other.…”

“…These interconnected health issues occur in families with a child living with a chronic condition, as well as in typically healthy families. Previous work on families has supported improving eating habits [61,66], increasing exercise through family-focused exergames [64], and improving family awareness and health goals through online family portals and social networks [8,37]. Our work expands family-centered design by examining how models of self-tracking can be expanded and applied to the family context, where family members are tracking together to improve the health of a family member or the entire family.…”

The Unintended Consequences of Social Media in Healthcare: New Problems and New Solutions

“…Comparison is also an important issue when competing in teams. In two gamified family-focused collaborative health app studies [46] [47], parents complained about the possibility that their children may become demotivated if other families ranked better than theirs did. The extensive usage of gamification creates a tolerance to it.…”

Social Reflections on Fitness Tracking Data

“…Wearable health sensors open opportunities for novel PA intervention for adults [9,31,38] and children [3,32,36,62]. While these tools are promising, only a notable few have explored the provision of behavioral support [38] or involved families [48,52]. This trend underscores the need to investigate how PA tracking tools can help families develop support structures to be active regularly.…”