A personalized support tool for the training of mindful walking: The mobile “MindfulWalk” application

Digital health prevention is a trend that becomes increasingly important in various domains. Health insurers crave for effective methods that can be offered to their customers. Moreover, smart mobile devices pose many advantages as they can be easily used in everyday life without being burdensome. Taking these advantages into account, completely new applications become possible. This thesis presents an application that is intended to support users to walk mindfully. It is a mobile personalized tool that senses the walking speed and provides haptic feedback thereof. The procedure of mindful walking, the technical prototype as well as preliminary study results are presented and discussed. The reported user experience and the study result indicate promising perspectives for a tool that supports a mindful walking behavior. Altogether, the use of modern smart mobile device sensors paves the way for useful mobile application in the context of health prevention in particular and health care in general.