Towards Combating Youth Obesity with a Mobile Fitness Application

This paper presents the results of the first phase in a multi-phase study developing an educational fitness application on mobile devices to help combat the growing levels of obesity among youth age 11 to 17. This first phase studies demographic differences across age and gender with regards to physical activities, computer games and mobile technology usage in order to develop an adaptive mobile fitness application that requires physical movement by the user while maintaining interest and enjoyment levels. Results indicate significant differences in gender in social activities versus action oriented type games but little difference in types of fitness activities. Across age groups there were some significant differences in terms of their interest in games involving strategy, action and violence. Also of note was that youth in the range of 14-15 tended to view physical activities as more difficult versus those both older and younger than them for the ages we studied. Youth also differed significantly in the type of mobile facilities they used with those older than 13 tending to use G.P.S., music and video facilities much more than those aged 11 to 13. These results have been incorporated into an initial prototype fitness application that will be tested on subjects in the next study phase.