Health Passport

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Health Passport was one of the outcomes of Project-I.

Project is one of the core subjects in each semester of Master of Design program at School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal. It intend to explore personal interest of the student at a basic level of design area, which may further be helpful to choose a specific area of design.

I choose to design for health and fitness activities.

Design of a self-measuring fitness tool for a gymnasium of a higher educational institute

How it started?

Premise

On a visit to the gymnasium at a higher education Institute, no trainer was found who can guide and assist users. Posters on the wall having description of exercise was too pixelated to be readable. For 1st time gymnasium visitor who want to start doing exercise there are lot of apprehensions. Like how to start? Which exercise to do? How to perform an exercise? What should be the body posture in doing any exercise? And so on... These factors prove to be a deterrent for someone who want to start exercise. Designing for the gymnasium environment to address these concerns will encourage, motivate and guide anyone desirous of making a conscious efforts towards health and fitness activities.

Purpose

Design to help people invest time in health and fitness activities. Training in Gymnasium without a trainer or proper knowledge can be hazardous. This project aims at beginners who just started or wants to start working out in the Gymnasium.

Stakeholders

Users of Gymnasium at SPA Bhopal.

Methods used

Study the user behaviour inside the Gymnasium using Observations.

Tools used - Photography, Video Recording and interview.

Site : Gymnasium of School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal

Sample Characteristics: Observations were made at random in the mornings and evenings (Pilot) Novice and expert gymnasium users observed over 2 weeks.

Result : Analysed in terms of - Environment, Users, Machines & Equipment and User interaction

Some of the insights after studying of gymnasium environment were:

01) Novice users face most difficulty in absence of an instructor

02) Lack of motivation and difficulty in following a fixed regime

03) Three pillars of good health are Nutrition, Physical Activity and Rest

04) All the related information already exists

05) Difficulty in measuring results over time

Based on these insights, few things were very clear:

01 My target should be novice users

02 I should work to present information is appropriate manner

03 Try to motivate and help users in keeping track of fitness activities

So, I started with compiling information related to nutrition, exercise and rest.

Proposed for calling the gymnasium as 'Health Studio'. Based on the fact that the users are used to working in various studios in campus. So the place where they are working for their own health can safely be called as Health Studio.

And the idea for design of self measuring fitness tool for gymnasium users to track their activities was inspired by a passport. Health Passport intends to inform and help a novice gymnasium users in absence of an instructor to keep a track of fitness activities.

I presented a research paper titled 'Design of a self measuring fitness tool for a gymnasium of a higher education institute' at the international conference of Humanising Work and Work Environment HWWE 2018.

Here is how the prototype of Health Passport looks like ...

Thank you !

Have a look at my other projects

Health Passport || Type Design || Park_S || Communication & Cognition || Cultural Communication || Photography