Physical Activity Self-efficacy Intervention Application (PAS)
The Problem
Studies show that adults with obesity do not meet public health guidelines for physical activity. Our client, Seung Lee, a professor of Kinesiology here at Iowa State, has set out to create an online intervention program to help individuals. Evidence demonstrates that regular physical activity reduces this population's risk of progression of chronic diseases, even without weight loss. The problem being addressed is the need of an easy and accessible way to administer the intervention research study being conducted by Professor Lee.
The Solution
Our team has been tasked with developing a mobile application to aid our client in administering this research study. This application will deliver curated fitness advice to the study participants in the experimental group. Different modules will be released during different phases of the study. The content will include articles and videos provided by the client, and mini-games with information also provided. The app will also send participants notifications and emails throughout the study as reminders to complete the scheduled tasks.
The application will also feature a chat room where participants can directly message the research team to make communication easy and keep their personal identities undisclosed. A similar feature will be a discussion board section, where participants of the study can that about their progress and ask questions while still keeping their identities hidden as is required with a study of this nature.
Implementation
Our team decided to develop this application using Flutter. Flutter is a development kit that allows us to develop on both the iOS and Android platforms simultaneously. Originally, our client had requested just the iOS app and hoped for an Android one in the future. We decided that we could deliver both if we went with a framework such as Flutter.
On the backend, we are using JavaScript exclusively. The server runs on Node using the Express, SQLite, Nodemailer, and Cron libraries for its API, database, email service, and scheduler. It is hosted on an AWS EC2 instance, and all communication with the server runs on HTTPS.