Mobile Apps for Health and Wellbeing: Physical Exercise, Breathing, Mindfulness

Mobile Apps for Health and Wellbeing: Physical Exercise, Breathing, Mindfulness

HCI Helsinki Lecture Series

Luca Chittaro

Human-Computer Interaction LabUniversity of Udine, Italy 

http://hcilab.uniud.it

Different activities that can be potentially embraced by almost any person such as physical exercise, deep and slow breathing or relaxation training have been shown to have beneficial effects on health and wellbeing. Mindfulness practice allows people to gain further advantages (e.g., in terms of psychological health, social relationships, and performance at various tasks) and has become the subject of a large amount of health research  with literally thousands of journal papers published. Nevertheless, people have difficulty in learning and/or in regularly engaging in such activities, no matter how beneficial they could be to them. For these reasons, our projects explore how to use computers (and especially mobile devices) to make these activities simpler to approach and more appealing, supporting people in engaging with and practicing them. This talk will present our latest project, focusing on different application we developed for respectively physical exercise, breathing training, relaxation training and mindfulness. For each application, I will also summarize the studies we carried out to assess their effectiveness and highlight major findings.

Biographical Sketch

Luca Chittaro is full professor of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Udine, Italy, where he heads the HCI Lab (http://hcilab.uniud.it). His major research interests are in the area of human-computer interaction, particularly in virtual reality, mobile devices, serious games, persuasive technologies, and their applications in health and safety. He has authored or co-authored over 160 academic publications.

He has received research grants from a wide range of organizations, including the European Union (EU), the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MIUR), and companies such as the Benetton Group.

He has been co-chair of  international conferences such as ACM Web3D 2004, ACM Web3D 2005, Mobile HCI 2003, Mobile HCI 2007 and Persuasive 2014. He serves on the Editorial Board of the Personal and Ubiquitous Computing journal and the Journal of Mobile User Experience. He has been editor of special issues of international journals such as Computers & Education, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction.