Happy Feet, a mobile wellness application developed by a team from Stanford, is among the six winners of the 2010 Health 2.0 Developer Challenge.
The brainchild of James Yang and Anthony Lai, graduate students in the Stanford Mobile and Social Computing Group, Happy Feet allows users to harness their social network to increase their physical activity. The application took first place in the competition's Move Your App! Developer Challenge.
Making fitness fun was a driving factor in creating the application, said Lai:
One of our main goals is to build infrastructures to support the mobile and social platforms. Happy Feet is one of the mobile applications that is built on top of these infrastructures ... We believe that by injecting social elements and gaming mechanisms, it would become a much more enjoyable experience for people to exercise. We also think the use of positive peer pressure would increase motivation further.
Using the application, you can track exercise goals, earn rewards and connect with friends on Facebook to create virtual fitness clubs, compete with others and achieve group goals. Happy Feet and the additional winning technologies will be showcased at the Health 2.0 San Francisco Conference, which kicks-off on Thursday.
