A cloud-based serious games framework for obesity

Obesity is becoming an outstanding public health issue in most countries of the world. One innovative approach to address this problem is utilizing serious games which combine exercise and gaming in more attractive manners. While attempts have been made to use gaming to tackle obesity, existing work generally fail to provide the full potential of pervasive exergaming (i.e. anywhere, anytime and from any device) with activity recommendation, evaluation, and in many cases even a suitable context (i.e. temporal, spatial, and vital sign parameters) tracking mechanism. In this paper, we propose a cloud computing-based pervasive serious games framework that can address above issues effectively and thus augments current obesity treatment methods and empower therapists and patients with a comprehensive process of continuous treatment and long-term management of obesity. The design and implementation of the proposed platform for obesity is described and illustrated through the description of a sample serious game.