Paper Reading #9: Jogging over a distance between Europe and Austrailia

Jogging over a distance between Europe and Austrailia


Authors - Florian Mueller, Frank Vetere, Marting R. Gibbs, Darren Edge, Stefan Agamanolis, Jennifer G. Sheridan


Authors Bio - Florian Mueller was a PhD student at the University of Melbourne at the time of this paper's publication and he is now working as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Stanford University.
Frank Vetere is a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne researching Human-Computer Interaction and Interaction Design.
Martin Gibbs is a lecturere at the University of Melbourne and is investigating interactive technology as it relates to society.
Darren Edge is a researcher at Microsoft Research and has a PhD from the University of Cambridge.
Stefan Agamanolis was a researcher at the Distance Lab in Scotland at the time of publication and has a PhD from MIT.
Jennifer Sheridan was a researcher at the London Knowledge Lab at the time of publication of this paper and has a PhD from Lancaster University in Lancaster, UK.


Venue - This paper was presented at the UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23rd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology.


Summary


Hypothesis - In this paper, researchers explain a framework they have built called Jogging over a Distance that allows jogging to be more social. In doing so, the researchers hope to support their hypothesis that this framework can be used to collect data on how people perform social exertion activities and use said data to build more socially conscious exercising software that promotes long term user participation.


Contents - Jogging over a Distance requires 2 users to agree on a time to begin jogging and input a target heart rate into the system. The users then put on a headset, heart rate monitor, and computer/phone. As the users jog, their heart rate data is sent to a server where the information is compared to the target rates of the users. If one of the user's heart rate is faster than their goal and the other user's is slower then the faster user's audio will seem to come from in front of the slower user increasing the desire to perform better.


Methods - To test the effectiveness of the system, 17 participants went on 14 runs using Jogging over a Distance. To evaluate the system's performance on the subjects, extensive interviews were conducted with all participants after use and analyzed. These interviews consisted of note taking during and after the sessions, discussing heart rate data to better unravel the events that took place, and using this data to form affinity diagrams. Because of this style of data collection and analyses, the researchers were developing only qualitative results to better discuss what the system did right and wrong rather than crunch some numbers that may be misleading due to the social nature of this project.


Results - Communication integration proved to be extremely valuable in getting users involved during the activity by creating a goal of side-by-side conversation that was only possible if target heart rates were being met. This also helped users feel safer and led to many users jogging further than they would have alone. Effort comprehension also proved valuable to participants as they learned about how their bodies actually exercise in a relative sense rather than a competitive sense because users were at different levels of fitness meaning just because one person is slower than another doesn't mean that the slower person is putting in any less effort. Keeping this fact in mind, participants said that working hard and staying right beside their partner led to greater satisfaction from the fact that both parties knew that equal effort was being exerted. The virtual mapping of the participants based on heart rates was overall viewed positively because some of the participants couldn't run with their partners before because they would be too fast or slow but Jogging over a Distance fixed that. Their were still negatives when a user entered in a bad baseline value or external factors got in the way.


Conclusion - The researchers conclude by saying they hope this study paves the way for more research and application regarding social integration with physical exertion.


Discussion


I think the researchers achieved their goal of showing how social integration with physical exertion can encourage people to exercise more. Putting myself in this situation has me convinced that this would motivate me to exert more if someone sounded distantly in front of me. I found this study especially interesting as a first step in what could be a great field in the future as group exercise is brought into the space. The only fault of this work that I could find was the lack of concrete data but it makes sense to take a qualitative approach because numbers are not as important in something that is attempting to increase participation and encouragement of physical activity. However, this approach could have been improved if the participants had been studied for a longer period of time to see if habits developed or not based on the system.