On June 27, 2018, the Ready Set Fit app was presented at the DH 2018 international conference in Mexico City. The PI Katherine Faull presented a poster to the conference attendees about the app that focussed especially on creating relationships with local communities in the crowdsourcing of local information for the creation of paths. The abstract for the poster is included here.
Crowdsourcing community wellness: Coding a mobile app for health and education
Katherine Faull, Michael S. Thompson, Jacob Mendelowitz, Caroline Whitman, Shaunna Barnhart, Bucknell University
Abstract–Poster DH 2018
In response to the widely reported increase in obesity and related health problems in the US, a team of faculty, staff and students at Bucknell University have authored a mobile app that incentivizes exercise through the use of crowdsourced public-facing humanities content of local interest. ReadySetFit, available on both Apple and Android phones, is a completely student-coded app that leverages a Google Maps platform and the Google My Maps application.1 The user can select from a set of walking paths that have been created using the Google My Maps app, which contain points of interest that present cultural/historical information to the user as he or she approaches the physical location of each point. Once a user has reached all points of interest, or manually clicked a button to finish a workout, the distance covered is saved to the handheld device and can be reviewed at a later date.
Key components of the success of ReadySetFit have been the ease of use and the localized and crowdsourced nature of the information provided. Griffiths and Barbour argue that the creation of “smart cities” greatly enhances the sense of place among local citizens (Griffiths and Barbour 2016). Our university collaboration with a local civic group (The Improved Milton Experience) in the post-industrial central Pennsylvania town of Milton has seen local youth become engaged in local history through crowd-sourcing content for specific points of interest while incentivizing citizens to walk around the town by receiving rewards and discounts at local shops when they show the app’s “Fit Card” – a summary of their recent workouts. Furthermore, partnering with the statewide system of parks (DCNR) and its “Think Outside” higher-education partnership program2 has promoted the app to a wide user-base who are already visiting the parks but who want to know about the history and environment through which they are walking.
Although in its initial stages, ReadySetFit has shown the potential to overcome the major obstacle to maintaining an exercise routine–incentive (Harris and Roushanzamir: Conroy et al). The incentive is multi-dimensional: engaging with new and interesting place-based content in real- time, collecting completed pathways, obtaining fitness levels for financial rewards through local business partnerships, and contributing to the creation of new pathways Through crowdsourcing content, user participation promotes both individual wellness and community buy-in. The place-based content that is provided to the user is created by members of the community and fosters active engagement in creating a sense of place (Lepofsky and Fraser 2003).
1 http://www.readysetfitapp.org
2 http://www.dcnr.pa.gov/Education/ThinkOutside/Pages/default.aspx
The poster presentation will demonstrate the app itself and also show the process undergone by the students in terms of information design. We will also demonstrate the path creation guidelines that have been shared with local organizations and can be adopted for creating pathways anywhere in the world with cellular data connectivity.
References
Conroy, David E., Chih-Hsiang Yang, Jaclyn P. Maher, “Behavior Change Techniques in Top- Ranked Mobile Apps for Physical Activity”, In American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Volume 46, Issue 6, 2014, Pages 649-652, ISSN 0749-3797, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2014.01.010.
Griffiths Mary and Kim Barbour. “‘Imagine If Our Cities Talked to Us’: Questions about the Making of ‘responsive’ Places and Urban Publics.” In Making Publics, Making Places, 27-48. South Australia: University of Adelaide Press, 2016. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.20851/j.ctt1t304qd.8.
Harris,Felicia and Elli Lester Roushanzamir. “#Blackgirlsrun: Promoting Health and Wellness Outcomes Using Social Media.” Fire!!! 3, no. 1 (2014): 160-89. doi:10.5323/fire.3.1.0160.
Leipert, Beverly D., Belinda Leach, and Wilfreda E. Thurston, eds. Rural Women’s Health. Toronto; Buffalo; London: University of Toronto Press, 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3138/j.ctt2tv021.
Lepofsky, Jonathan, and James C. Fraser. “Building Community Citizens: Claiming the Right to Place-making in the City.” Urban Studies 40, no. 1 (2003): 127-42. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43084177.
readysetfitapp.org 
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