A new mobile ubiquitous computing application to control obesity: SapoFit

Abstract

The objective of this work was the proposal, design, construction and validation of a mobile health system for dietetic monitoring and assessment, called SapoFit. This application may be personalized to keep a daily personal health record of an individual's food intake and daily exercise and to share this with a social network. The initiative is a partnership with SAPO – Portugal Telecom. SapoFit uses Web services architecture, a relatively new model for distributed computing and application integration. SapoFit runs on a range of mobile platforms, and it has been implemented successfully in a range of mobile devices and has been evaluated by over 100 users. Most users strongly agree that SapoFit has an attractive design, the environment is user-friendly and intuitive, and the navigation options are clear.

Keywords:

• E-Health
• m-health
• mobile computing
• Android
• iPhone
• obesity
• Web services

Acknowledgements

Part of this work has been supported by the Instituto de Telecomunicações, Next Generation Networks and Applications Group (NetGNA), Portugal, by National Funding from the FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia through the PEst-OE/EEI/LA0008/2011 Project, and by Portugal Telecom – SAPO, Portugal.

Declaration of Interest: No author has a conflict of interest with the contents of this manuscript.