Meds1101 pecha kucha
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Persuasive technologies aim to influence human behavior and decisions through ambient intelligence that is seamlessly integrated into our environments. While this can benefit users by encouraging positive behaviors, it also raises ethical concerns about autonomy and manipulation if not designed and applied carefully. The boundaries between human and technology are blurring in ways that require consideration of social and personal implications.
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Meds1101 pecha kucha
- 8. Pros/Cons
- 10. Ambient Intelligence and Persuasive Technology : The Blurring Boundaries Between Human and Technology Peter-Paul Verbeek
- 15. Social and Personal Implications
Editor's Notes
- The reason the MyFitnessPal system is so easy to use is because it learns from you and how you eat. All of us tend to eat the same foods over time and our diets become quite repetitive. MyFitnessPal remembers what you've eaten and done most often in the past, and makes it easy for you to add those foods again to your log.
- Study after study has confirmed the benefits of keeping track of the food you eat and the activity you do. It's simple - the more consistently you track your food intake, the more likely you are to lose weight. That's why every successful weight management program suggests that you keep a food diary and an activity log.
- To lose weight, you need to eat and drink fewer calories than you use each day. Simply enter the food and drink you consume and the quantities, and the calorie counter does the work for you. You'll also need to get used to reading food labels to find out the calorie content in packaged food and drink.
- Many of these technologies are generated from the United States to promote health and weight loss, as they are notorious for all things oversized, including their food. By 2006 73% of adults in America had a body mass index that qualified as overweight or obese. Millions of Americans strive to lose weight and in the year 2000 over 46% percent of women and 33% of men were trying to lose weight.
- While calorie counting can be an extremely beneficial tool for those who are trying to learn how to eat properly and manage their diet, for most, calorie counting becomes nothing more than a deep-rooted obsession, a bad habit that they just can’t break.
- Obsessive calorie counting can often end up being a “gateway” into a plethora of other eating issues and disorders. Limiting yourself to less calories than your body needs is putting yourself at risk both emotionally and physically. Without enough calories you will find yourself feeling exhausted, depressed and with hardly enough energy to go about your daily tasks.
- Technology has permeated our lives and has the remarkable ability to be a great tool for taking more control of our lives as well as the ability to control us. When we go out and exercise or eat a healthy meal and log it, it invokes positive reinforcement, especially from web-based-communities through sharing our experiences, encouraging us to do so more regularly and acts as a powerful motivator.
- CONSIts easy to cheat the app by entering the wrong amount of calories and sometimes the food that you’ve eaten is not listed so its not always accurate. With such a strong emphasis on calories its hard not to become obsessed, and to skip meals because you don’t want to eat too many.PROSSeeing the numbers really means you try to change your bad eating habits and it makes you feel good when you do well for the day It sets a healthy time frame in which you should lose weight and warns you that eating too few calories is unhealthy.
- Myfitnesspal is clearly a persuasive technology. Persuasive technologies are defined as a technology that is designed to change attitudes and behaviours of the users through persuasion and social influence but not through coercion. They can either intentionally or unintentionally disrupt or modify our everyday beliefs, attitudes and behaviours. As somewhat stated in the pros and cons, these persuasive technologies can become somewhat obsessive and change behaviours and attitudes in a negative way.
- As Verbeek says in his article ‘the developing fields of ambient intelligence and persuasive technology brings about a convergence of information technology and cognitive science. Smart environments that are able to respond intelligently to what we do and that even aim to influence our behaviour.’ He also states that “by combining an understanding of how influencing behaviour works, new leeway has arisen for the design and application of technologies that encroach greatly on our everyday activities”
- For a while I used my fitness pal and tracked my own food consumption to see the results, although not using it for any particular reason, such as losing weight I thought it would be interesting to see how much information I could map. I could see why mapping food intake and exercise can be a good thing when attempting to lose weight because it is motivation to keep it up when you see you’re progress on the progress map and the app praises you for doing well.
- However motivation for staying healthy ideally should not come from an app on your phoneI found myself, that I became obsessed with what I ate and how much I was eating of it, I was determined to make sure the exact amount of calories would be added and every tiny thing I ate would go onto my fitness pal. It also became a determiner for my mood, if I went over for calories for that day and didn’t work them off it unmotivated me and made me want to give up.
- My fitness pal can also map your weight loss progress and your consumption of carbs, fats, sugars and protein. Although I personally didn’t pay much attention to this, you can see once again how as a persuasive technology it can make the user become obsessed with matching the goal and not going under or above their specific goals.
- There are several apps very similar to myfitnesspal, and also apps that link up to it, that can map even more of your everyday life, including how far you run, walk or travel and add it to the information on myfitness pal.My fitness pal is not useful in terms of using it as a reliable source for academic research as not every food is exact and its hard to track exactly what you’re eating the entire day. When it comes to exercise as well, it also depends on how well you’re doing the exercise as to whether you are actually burning off that exact amount of calories.
- This persuasive technology has both implications in terms of obsession and disruption of everyday activity. A lot of time is taken out of your day thinking about what you’re eating and how many calories you need to burn off when you work out that day. Some would say this has a positive influence because you become more aware of what you’re eating and how much you need to burn off, but sometimes obsession can be taken too far and it takes over your life.