Multimedia for Social Good: Green Energy Donation for Healthier Societies

According to the world health organization, overweight and obesity are globally the fifth leading death factor, and the number of death in adults caused by overweight or obesity reaches 2.8 million every year. One of the main causes of overweight and obesity is the sedentary life style with non-existent or very little physical activity. The objective of this paper is to contribute a proposal of a motivational system to help sedentary individuals get physically active. We specifically tackle the sedentary life style enforced by watching TV for long periods of time daily. We suggest a model of an exercising system that encourages the collective production of green human energy, to be donated to poor countries. This system leverages people's drive for social good to boost their motivation to generate green energy by exercising. This green energy donation system also engages sedentary people in team competitions, while making a better use of the time spent watching TV every day. We designed and developed the proposed green energy donation system and conducted an experiment with a total of 11 participants. The findings are very promising as our evaluation shows that the participating subjects were highly motivated by this system to perform the recommended physical activity, with 75% them exceeding our expectation for exercise intensity and duration.