USC-Designed Smartphone App Aims to Get Older Adults 'Moving Up'

The University of Southern California's Stacey Schepens Niemiec and colleagues have designed a smartphone application to encourage older adults to improve their health and wellness. The Moving Up app considers the mind and the body, as well as the context in which a person performs daily activities. The app also incorporates concepts from stereotype embodiment theory, which examines how social stereotypes on aging influence the health behaviors of older adults. Moving Up employs the DERIVA platform, which streamlines the design, acquisition, analysis, sharing, and publication of data across project lifecycles; the DERIVA server runs customized processes that retrieve tasks for study participants and record user activity, and cloud messaging services send real-time alerts to participants' cellphones. One the data collection phase concludes, Moving Up will have a data archive that should enable the researchers to optimize its usability, likeability, and effectiveness.