Applying gamification and social network techniques to promote health activities

“Obesity” is the Civilized disease of many developed countries. Many people attempt to control daily diet and participate in related activities of health promotion in order to manage their weight, to improve body shape, or maintain self-health. However, there are lot of people fail to perform the related activities of health promotion continuously because of the lack of motivation. The purpose of this study is to develop a mobile application (App) for providing different motivational factors to trigger and to reinforce people in participating the activities of health promotion. Gamification and social-networking features are applied to the App based on the theories of psychological and behavioral science. This application composes by three main modules include diet diary module, public social group module, and health coach module. A Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) was applied to measure the perceived user experience when using the proposed system. User's behavioral intention to use and actual system use were also measured.