New ideas

Since the latest blog entry, the idea for our prototype has taken a bit a walk on the wild side. After some discussion we have decided to go for a more fun version of the initial idea. Fun is actually the key word in our new, and probably final idea. The idea of a shoe that senses movement still stands, however we would like to enhance this "intelligent shoe" in the sense that it registeres steps and their intensity. The feedback that is given according to the amount of activity in the shoe sensors will be done through sound. A shoe that is fitted with 2 (or more) force sensors and a speaker will allow for tons of interactions that can benefit people in a lot of ways, mostly health-wise. As you see, the end-goal still stands: "get people more healthy".

The principle we will be using is "fun theory" as illustrated in the YouTube video below

Fun theory basically assumes that behavior will be displayed more often if it is fun! Therefore our interactive 'fun-shoe' will give young children a goal to engage in physical exercise more instead of staying in and playing video games. Goals can be set in different ways: rewards per certain amount of steps, intensity of sound according to amplitude of movement, make sounds (music) together.

Although this idea has the potential of activating people - and especially children - more, there are still a lot of questions surrounding the implementation and the actual behavior that this fun-shoe will illicit in real-world situations. The first step now is to build an actual (hardware) prototype that allows for exploration of behavior involving this artefact.