Using Mobile Social Health Applications Fosters Better Health Decisions
http://www.journalofdst.org/March2011/PDF/VOL-5-2-SYM18-GAY.pdf
This journal article helps explain a mobile-phone-based approach to making healthier decisions. The application, named Aurora, essentially allows users to post a picture, write a comment, and select an emotion icon for their current mood. The instructions for users in the study were broad and essentially allowed them to take pictures of anything they thought was related to their health. As a result users posted pictures of food, other people they were with at the time, scenery, exercise that they were doing, and much more. Other users could then look at these statuses and comment on them. The study concluded that users became more aware of the daily health choices they made and also allowed them to see how they compared to other people with the decisions others were making.
The article is relevant to this course because the mobile device acted as a gateway for users to interact with one another. Inevitably, a social network can be drawn between users based on the posts they make between one another. This article was just about the initial study done with this particular software. However, I worked with the authors of this article and the homophily effect, deeply investigated by Nicholas Christakis, is being investigated in future studies using this application. The homophily effect basically states that the people who most closely interact with you ‘rub off’ on you and eventually the tightly knit group of people will act similar. Therefore, the theory is in this project, that if it appears a few users are frequently interacting with one another over a long term basis they should eventually adapt to one another and have similar health decisions. For example, if there are four users in a closely knit network and three of them are extremely fit, then the fourth will feel more inclined to workout more. However, this particular experiment only lasted two weeks and had seventeen users. If there were a lot more test subjects and an extended trial period then the homophily effect may have become prevalent.