Make your garden grow: designing a physical activity estimation improvement game

We present a novel game and virtual world based application that is aimed at improving the physical activity estimation skills of parents. It has been well established that lack of proper estimation of preschool children's activity levels may be one of the main causes for childhood obesity. Childhood obesity has several long term health effects ranging from cardio-vascular disease to type II diabetes and obese preschool children are at risk for later life. We have developed an application that caters to both the parent and the child and uses a virtual garden as a fledgling ecosystem controlled both by the parent and the child. By using a low-cost activity monitoring device and combining the data collected from the device with the estimation inputs from the parent the ecosystem manifests into real life-like visualizations that are updated on a daily basis. The goal of the design is to promote a two way intervention: 1)provide parents with a tool to daily estimate and monitor their child's activity levels and 2)motivate the child to achieve built in goals and keep the ecosystem lively and flourishing. We believe that our design will lead to improved outcomes in physical activity levels as well as long term retention and reuse by the parents. In this paper we are providing the design of the system and in future plan to present the results of a pilot trial.