BALANCE: towards a usable pervasive wellness application with accurate activity inference

Technology offers the potential to objectively monitor people‘s eating and activity behaviors and encourage healthier lifestyles. BALANCE is a mobile phone-based system for long term wellness management. The BALANCE system automatically detects the user‘s caloric expenditure via sensor data from a Mobile Sensing Platform unit worn on the hip. Users manually enter information on foods eaten via an interface on an N95 mobile phone. Initial validation experiments measuring oxygen consumption during treadmill walking and jogging show that the system‘s estimate of caloric output is within 87% of the actual value. Future work will refine and continue to evaluate the system‘s efficacy and develop more robust data input and activity inference methods. Categories and Subject Descriptors J.3 [Computer Applications]: Life and Medical Sciences – health. General Terms Design, Human Factors, Verification Keywords pervasive health, long term health monitoring, wellness, caloric balance

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: WMCSA
• Authors: Tamara Denning, Adrienne H. Andrew, Rohit Chaudhri, Carl Hartung, Jonathan Lester, Gaetano Borriello, Glen Duncan
• Keywords: Caloric, Long Term, Mobile Computing, User‘s Caloric Expenditure, WMCSA 2009