UP health: ubiquitously persuasive health promotion with an instant messaging system

The spread of ubiquitous technologies into the health domain provide an opportunity to investigate interactive communications that can persuade users to adopt certain beneficial behaviors.. We are interested in understanding how networked devices can support and leverage social influence. The aim of this research is to explore the potential of online group interaction for promoting healthy behavior patterns and to investigate how the participation in the online group activity can influence an individual.s off-line health-related behavior. As first part of this research, we devised an Instant Messaging (IM) system which shares context information relating to health and covering things such as physical activity and smoking behavior.