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Supporting Better Physical Activity in a Smart City: a Framework for Suggesting and Supervising Walking Paths

2019; Advances in Science, Technology and Engineering Systems Journal (ASTESJ); Volume: 4; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.25046/aj040449

2415-6698

Mário Rodrigues, Rita Santos, Alexandra Queirós, Anabela G. Silva, João Amaral, Patrícia Simões, Jorge Gonçalves, Ciro Martins, Ántónio Pereira, Nelson Pacheco Rocha,

Innovative Human-Technology Interaction

The increase of elderly population creates the need to promote healthy aging, with autonomy and independence, for preserving the functional capacity and quality of life as much as possible.To achieve this goal the recommendations include walking a certain amount of steps daily, given that the exact amount of steps changes with age, lesions, and chronic health conditions that can affect health and well-being.Understanding how much exercise is adequate for an individual requires specialized knowledge and training.It is important to avoid risks that include: (1) be too aggressive in exercising and increase injuries, create new ones, and later refrain in exercising more; or (2) be too conservative and in the long run have an activity level under each one's potential and below what is recommended.In this article is proposed and discussed a framework that aims to support people having an adequate level of activity for its particular condition and to do it without disrupting daily routines.The framework is supported by a software system built for monitoring well-being and physical activity in the context of Smart Cities.The system is composed by: (1) smartphone applications that interact with the end-user for showing possible exercises and walk routes, and that collects some relevant data; (2) a back-office application that collects and presents data obtained from the smartphone applications.The back-office application is designed for health professionals to follow users' progression over time, to recommend new exercises or to correct less optimal situations.The first tests with a system implementing this framework show that the solution is robust and able to be used in a large scale.