Home automation serving a healthier lifestyle

Abstract

The increase of obesity and overweight is alarming, and has major human and financial detrimental consequences. The problem of obesity and overweight is caused mainly by an increase in physical inactivity, for which one of the main reasons is the long hours spent every day in front of the TV. The system proposed in this paper targets individuals who are overweight or subjects for whom doctors have prescribed a minimum physical activity. The MPEG-V standard [1] is used in this work in order to control home actuators as a motivation for individuals to transform exercise intention into exercise activity. To evaluate our system, we conducted an experiment with 31 subjects, and the results are promising as they show that our system was successful at motivating subjects to perform physical exercise while watching TV.