Long periods of idle sitting are known to significantly increasing the risk for overweight and obesity which, in turn, dramatically increase the risk of several debilitating, and deadly diseases, including diabetes as well as heart disease. Despite the negative effects of long sitting periods, the number of hours that people remain continuously in a state of low physical activity keeps increasing in most first world countries, including Germany. This not only causes issues for affected individuals, e.g. by reducing their quality of life as well as their overall life expectancy, but it also increases the stress on the health care and the pension system as well as the labor market.
Economists, social scientists, and psychologists have shown that comparatively inexpensive nudges can effectively influence the behavior of people without reducing their freedom of choice. The goal of this project group is to develop a mobile app with an associated set of backend services that applies the idea of nudging to reduce the periods of physical inactivity of university members. Towards this end, the resulting platform shall not only provide the means for context-aware nudges, but it shall also support the systematic analysis of their effectiveness for different users.
From a theoretical perspective, the project group will cover concepts related to various forms of nudging (e.g. notifications, gamification, etc.) as well as the development of context-aware mobile applications (e.g. signal processing, machine learning, etc.). From a practical perspective, the project group will cover full stack development with the Jakarta EE framework (Java), Android (Kotlin), and iOS (Swift). Students taking this course must be fluent in at least one object-oriented programming language and should be able to quickly apply their knowledge to other languages exhibiting similar abstractions.
The kickoff meeting for this course will take place on Tuesday, April 9th, 2024 from 8.00h to 12.00h in SA-126.
The admission is managed centrally.