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Games 4 Health

What motivates people in their 20s to improve their amount of physical activity in a Dutch urban environment?

Team

Rick Borgeld

Interaction Designer / Researcher


Paula Barreto

Marketeer/ researcher


Karen de Graaf

Researcher


Suzanne Tromp

Researcher


Commissioner:

Description

“De laatste loodjes”

First of all: Happy New Year! (yes we are still allowed to say this)

It has been a busy couple of weeks. The first prototype was finished, but when we tested it, we discovered quite some bugs. Although Karen was able to fix some bugs, our programmer is going to work on them this week, so everything will be ready for the FINAL presentations next week. Yes, NEXT WEEK.

And…tatatataaa, we came up with a name! Meet LumiMate, the small interactive screen that reminds you to take a small break from time to time. Because, “a simple move can change everything”.

We hired a friend from HKU to create a video about the LumiMate, explaining how it works. We are really excited to work with him, as his drawings and style fit really well with our product.

This week will be about preparing for the final presentation, and finishing the final paper. We are going to design our own pillows for the officechairs and the frames for the LumiMate need to be finished too. Also, we are going to meet our partner for the last time. Since he is not able to attend the final presentations, we will do a separate presentation for him to show the LumiMate.

Creating our LED screens

Programmer

So as you know, for the last couple of weeks we have been focussing on making our product more playful with the three different modes. Last week we talked to Wouter Meijs, who knows a lot about sensors and all that kind of stuff. He told us it would be better to focus on only the individual mode, because of the small amount of time we have for our prototype and since it would take a lot of time to build a database that could support this system. You can imagine, we were a little bit discouraged by this news. Luckily, Wouter introduced us to Pim, a programmer that told us that it is possible to create the three different modes. Imagine how happy we were with this!

Now the product will consist of one arduino that will be connected to four different pressure sensors. These separate sensors will then be connected to the four different screens. For us this means that we are finally starting to create our own stuff, because we will personally create the pressure sensors. Awesome! The connections will probably be by using wires, at least for the prototype. The wires will be used in order to make the programming more easy, so it will take less time to create the products. Of course, later on we will try to make it wireless.

NISB

Another important event happened last week: we presented our whole concept to our partner at the NISB. He invited a colleague that is an expert in interventions at the workplace, something that is really useful for us. She pointed out that it is really important to think about the story behind the product for our product to work in the market. Why would our product sell? What makes our product more special and better than for example the standing desks? Of course, we know the answer to this, but it is always interesting to think of different marketing strategies that could be applied.

For our presentation we’ve made a small video to clarify the problem that we are addressing in our project. It was received really good and we were asked if it could be showed at a conference about health (yes we are going to be famous). Just to remind you of what the goal of our project is, here you’ll find the video: