We have developed a preventative health cell phone application that helps motivate teenage girls to exercise by taking advantage of their social desire to stay connected with their peers.

Our goal is to determine how collecting, sharing and comparing personal fitness information impacts activity level and health awareness.

how it works

A "clique" of up to four girlfriends use pedometers and a cell phone application to share step achievement.

When pedometer readings are entered into the Chick Clique application, the group progress report is automatically updated on cell phone of each member of the "clique."

Using technology to share this information is intended to "persuade" clique members to walk more. Friends are powerful sales people making it less likely that a girl will reject her friend's request to join her for a walk.

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why girls?

The prevalence of overweight adolescents in the United States has tripled in the past 20 years

When compared with teenage boys

• Teenage girls are less likely to stay active during adolescence
• Teenage girls are more likely to use unhealthy techniques for losing weight

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the name

The name "Chick Clique" was derived during exploratory field interviews with teenage girls. It is a name that they decided was appropriate for an application intended to increase daily exercise in a fun and collaborative way with their girlfriends. The original name "Buddy Walk" did not capture their attention nor the essence of the design.

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design process

Our initial design concept included functionality to facilitate portion control. Exploratory field interviews with registered dietitians revealed that placing an emphasis on portion size is dangerous for teenage girls, so we decided focus primarily on encouraging increased physical activity.

Interviews with teenagers revealed that they are most motivated by exercise that is fun and competitive so we incorporated competition in our design.

Ethnographic observations of teenagers at shopping malls and sporting events lead to the design of a cell phone application that incorporated communication via instant messaging.

We created a paper prototype to illustrate our concept to our target user group during exploratory field interviews. We used feedback from these interviews to design a prototype on a PDA.

We conducted a user study with the PDA prototype on two groups of teenage girls. Feedback was aquired by pre- and post-study questionaires and post-study interviews.

The results of our intial user study were encouraging and lead to the development of a cell phone version of Chick Clique. A larger user study with this prototype is scheduled for summer, 2006.

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the technology

initial user study

Group performance was rated by the girls as being the most powerful method of changing behavior. For more details see the full paper below.

BENEFITS:

Fits naturally into everyday life
Encourages pleasurable exercise
It is also competitive which can persuade
Encourages peer support and sharing
Reduces laziness, e.g. walking vs. driving a block
Can be generalized to other groups, e.g. boys and sedentary professors

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researchers

paper

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donors