Gamified Mobile Application and Stairstep Counter for Stair Walking

Sammanfattning: Gamification is an area that has attracted a substantial amount of interest in recent years and is something that can be applied almost everywhere. Health is also an area that is frequently discussed regarding how a person's health and daily exercise can be improved. Applying gamification to motivate people to exercise more is something that has been done before although they are usually marketed as health application. What if an application's main purpose was not to count the amount calories burnt but instead the exercise is an additional part? In this thesis you will find the development of a prototype that is a gamified Android application with the purpose to motivate people to walk more in stairs. In order to develop an application there was a need for a stairstep counter to count the number of steps a person has taken in a stair. Hence a stairstep counter was developed using the open source machine learning framework, TensorFlow, with classification and neural networks. The counter uses the y- and z-axis of the mobile accelerometer to classify if a movement of a person was a step or not. It was trained with a custom dataset that was created using data from walking in a stair and data collected from other movements. Resulting stairstep counter used in the application is a counter that counts stairsteps rather accurately. The final result of this thesis was a mobile application that uses animation and competition elements to enhance a person's stair walk experience.