Swā The Sustainable Lifestyle Coach

Ricky Ledesma | MCAD SD6500 Fundamentals of Sustainable Design | 12/14/2016Week 15 - Final Project

Fitness Mobile ApplicationMobile fitness apps have changed the way people create, record, and reach fitness goals, thanks to cellphones and mobile devices that put a powerful computer right in your pocket. Immediacy and consistency are keys to reaching fitness goals. If your gym is right next to your work, you're more likely to go. If it's easy to record the weight you just lifted or the miles you just ran, you're more likely to track your progress and be motivated by it. Mobile applications, designed for various mobile platforms, offer a range of tools for tracking and measuring your fitness goals.

Problem: About 58% of use some form of health tracking, but only 3% of us use these apps for more than a week. Actually inputting the different components of a meal represents a real user experience problem.

Swā: A Sustainable Lifestyle Mobile ApplicationA mobile application is a tool which provides the opportunity to foster an environment that facilitates and supports your desired changes, without engaging in goal-conflicting absurdity. Swā is a user-centered mobile application, which is designed with sustainable practices in mind. Swā enables users to understand and become aware of the environmental, economic, social, and cultural consequences of their personal lifestyle choices.

Lifestyle App for the Sustainability ChallengeTo approach the greater sustainability challenge, we can utilize a mobile application to provide immediacy and consistency to reach sustainability goals, cognitive computing of big data to support decision making, Internet of Things to provide subtle reminders, and even implement a virtual reality app to provide immersive awareness education of ongoing unsustainable actions around the world.

With this lifestyle app in our daily routine, we can present ourselves to the world in a more sustainable fashion. For instance, “How can we use this app to change our environmental impact?” It’s not a simple question to answer, but with cognitive computing to mine the data, we can receive data and decision-making support in order to learn how we can dispose of certain products. For example, snap a photo at the end of your meal, submit and allow the machine learning algorithm to identify items for sustainable waste processes, then display the waste options for the set of items in order to support the user’s decision making process.

Next Steps to Bring to Scale: Cognitive ComputingIn order to bring it to scale, all three of these technologies will need to be initialized and implemented with the app so the user can receive the full experience to drive their sustainable lifestyle to make positive socio-economic impacts. First, cognitive computing projects implement Machine learning to train the app to understand the foods that are applicable to you and provide sustainable practices based on common foods in your diet.

Here is an example of an input process of a generic meal with options to be more sustainable would be:

A. Take photo of meal for input data. B. Automatically have watson tally calories and food

value .C. Get personalized coaching to meet your diet goals D. Provide more sustainable options when sourcing

your next set of ingredients.E. Provide personalized cost analysis based on

financial, diet, and sustainability goals. F. Uses mobile app to remind you of next steps to

improve your next meal experience (this is an accountabilabuddy).

Next Steps to Bring to Scale: Artificial IntelligenceSecond we can replace a reminder ping with a sustainable lifestyle coach, also known as an Artificial Intelligent chatbot.

Working with an AI chatbot can provide answers when we ask tough questions. We can ask about what sustainable best practices are out there for other aspects of our lives, such as discussing alternative commuting methods to decrease your environmental impact, and the chatbot can provide various alternatives that offer different methods while also providing different experience features your commute may have. We can make AI integral to what you do in order to have peer-to-peer communication which creates better ways to work together.

Next Steps to Bring to Scale: Virtual RealityFinally, we can use virtual reality video experiences to listen to stories to understand better methods to reach more sustainable solutions for the greater sustainability challenge.

With virtual reality video experiences we can immerse ourselves in the video to deeply connect as well as increase our awareness of the major issues that our society faces, such as poverty, landfill waste in bodies of water, or beekeeping. Imagine the VR video sets you in a body of water with trash floating all around you and you first had to free yourself from a plastic six-pack ring. Wouldn’t you feel disgusted and devastated if you couldn’t free yourself?