Our Kinetics Family Awareness System helps parents monitor their own and their family's activity, and coordinate physical activities.

Rational for Features

Shoe Inserts

These shoe inserts monitor physical activity discretely, and report it back to the Kinetics system.

Through our concept validation, we received strong reactions against children knowing their status. However, there was also a need to know the health of children and be empowered to improve their lives. Hence, we developed this discrete way to monitor children's health without needing them to be conscious of the process.

Parent Pedometer Device

The pedometer like device that the parents carry helps record additional health information about adults. The device also acts as a key to access the Kinetics application.

Adults were more interested in tracking their progress, and do not have the same concerns about being conscious of monitoring their health as children do. Hence we created a tangible tracking device, from which parents can receive feedback. Additionally, the "key" aspect of the device concretely demonstrates the privacy aspect of the system.

Additionally, we realized in retrospect that older teens, can also utilize this adult side of the system, as they are more mature in their physical health responsibilities.

Personal Goals

The initial screen of the Kinetics application shows personal progress, with goals and trends. These help parents gauge their own physical health, while having control over their privacy settings regarding how much their family members can see about them.

In both our expert interview and our concept validation, we confirmed that goals play a central role in becoming physically active. Hence the ability to set personal goals with our system for parents. However, in conjunction to the discrete monitoring of children, there are no goals that children set for themselves. Instead it remains in the parents control to determine what is healthy for their child, and use the Kinetics system to help monitor their heath.

Family Status

Once in the Kinetics application, which, as mentioned above, is only accessible with the parent device, parents can check the status of their other family members.

While our concept validation moved us away from having family status publicly available to the entire family, the aspect of viewing trends for children and spouses was desired. The status allows family members to encourage one another, which we felt was more powerful that hollow system messages as a reward for being healthy.

Scheduling Family Life

The Kinetics system helps track the family's schedule, providing reminders when appropriate.

This aspect of our system became clear as an asset in our concept validation. Parents live busy lives, and having support in scheduling time to spend with family was seen as a great benefit.

Activity Suggestions

The Kinetics application provides activity suggestions based on individual and family preferences, and on local information such as weather and discounts.

As an aspect of an intelligent agent, we found suggestions to be a feasible functionality from the beginning of the semester. This basic idea was highly supported in our concept validation, seen as a way to empower parents to make decisions about activities to do for themselves, for their children, and together.