Fotofit: Reflecting on Diet & Exercise

Fall 2006 - Spring 2006
Advisors: Dr. Gregory Abowd, Dr. Rebecca Grinter
Georgia Institute of Technology

Motivation College freshman gain an average of 4.2 pounds in their first twelve weeks of school. Since prevention is better than cure, college students, who are still forming their long-term lifestyle patterns, should be encouraged to develop and maintain healthy lifestyle habits. Many existing systems designed for monitoring diet and exercise habits are time-consuming and do not highlight the relationship beetween diet and exercise.

System Design With these concerns in mind, we designed a personal diet and exercise monitoring system for college students. Fotofit allows users to record their diet and exercise habits by taking quick snapshots (using their camera phone) of the foods they eat and the physical activity that they engage in throughout their day. Users can then get a rich overview of their diet and exercise habits through a PC visualization application. For this project, I worked as part of a team - the team members included Brandon Brown, Marshini Chetty and Ellie Harmon.

Evaluation For our formative evaluation, we conducted interviews with 16 college students to try to identify the needs of our target population. We then derived usability and functional requirements and created 3 design alternatives. After receiving feedback about our designs in a poster session, we chose one design a created a prototype. We tested the prototype and system design using Think Aloud and Heuristic Evaluations and using a diary study. We used the feedback from these evaluations to iterate on our design. We presented our results at CHI 2006 (see below).

Resources We won 2nd place in the CHI 2006 Student Design Competition for this work. See our Paper.