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COULD YOUR MOBILE phone be the key to getting fit?
That is the question being posed by a Galway researcher and former White House fitness expert at an event in Boston today.
Ted Vickey is a PhD researcher at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at National University of Ireland Galway and was the executive director of the fitness center at the White House for 11 years under the Bush, Clinton and Bush Administrations.
Today, he is going to be speaking at the fifth annual Medicine 2.0 Congress in Harvard Medical School, Boston. There, he will tell delegates that “understanding one’s social network may be one key to better health”.
Explains Vickey:
Rather than surfing in the ocean, we are surfing the web. Rather than an outdoor game of tennis under the sun, we are inside our homes playing online virtual tennis on our Wii. People drive their cars to the gym and then take the escalator to the front door rather than walking and taking the stairs.
He posed the question: “But what if technology could be the solution to our problem?
What if our mobile phones could track our every step, provide healthy tips during the day, even persuade or motivate us when we need it most? This dream is now a reality all across the globe and it is called Mobile Health.
He noted that there are an estimated 13,000 health related apps in the iTunes, everything from monitoring blood pressure to tweeting body weight to tracking sleep cycles.
Motivation
As part of his PhD research, Vickey and his colleagues at NUI Galway collected over 4.5 million tweets sent via mobile fitness applications from around the world.
They then categorised these tweets into different classifications, in an attempt to understand correlations between online social networking and effective exercise motivation and adherence.
With studies indicating that lack of motivation is a key factor in why a person does not exercise, Vickey pointed out:
Mobile fitness apps not only allow for the sharing of information between user and health care providers, but also with a user’s friends.
After examining the information, he has determined that these self-monitoring units “will help change the face of health care around the globe”.
Vickey’s paper is called ‘Estimating the Long Term Effectiveness of Mobile Fitness Apps and Exercise Motivation’, and it has been shortlisted for the iMedicalApps-Medicine 2.0 mHealth Research Award.
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Thanks Neil,
Really enjoy these articles
Love to see these articles on the Journal. They transport you right into the history of the places and make you want to visit them. Please please write a book.
great article :)
You should be out supporting your teammates. Unlucky not to make the bench btw
Spike island is well worth the visit. Just wish there was more time to explore it more.
Quite tempted by the mediaeval town.
You should go – Rindoon is a treat, very atmospheric and in a superb location on the lakeshore. But do bring a guidebook or map to help understand what you’re seeing, when I was there a few years ago the explanatory signage was sparse to non-existant, and it’s extensive and can be confusing (Halpin and Newman’s ‘Ireland: An Archaeological Guide’ has a good description).
Tordel – agree, was there a few weeks ago and the signage is terrible.
Great article. Keep them coming!
Very interesting… Looks as though we will be taking a road trip soon. ;-)
So Mitchell escaped Slavery just to promote it in America? Interesting!
Essential Saturday reading, one of the best written and researched features to be found anywhere on the interweb. Thank you Neil :-)
Please do a weekly or biweekly one…. this is awesome stuff
Agree with Mick, Spike island is a fantastic visit .
The place is steeped in history.
Thank’s for another great article.
Fascinating read, thanks.
(On a side note I wonder what will future historians write about Ireland’s abandoned and half-built celtic tiger estates, dotted around the rural landscape).
Great article Neil.
Great article, Neil. I love the picture of Rindoon Gateway. Are these photos available to buy??
Brilliant article. Well done. If readers would like to visit Rindoon in August this year we are holding a Rindoon Revival on 18th as part of National Heritage Week. More here: https://www.facebook.com/rindoon.revival.2013
brilliant series Neil,
love both the articles & the photography
thank You.
I love these little time warp places. I was lucky enough to have visited spike island in the eighties, what a gold mine of irish history. I’ve not heard of the other places so they are now placed firmly on my bucket list :)
Good articles, I enjoy them.
But John Mitchel was not transported to Tasmania (Van Diemen’s Land) from Spike Island. He was transported to Bermuda where he was “hulked” (kept on a prison ship in nasty conditions, although better than that of common criminals because he was a political prisoner) just off the ironically named “Ireland Island”. His health was very precarious, he suffered very badly from asthma and nearly died. Because of this the prison doctors recommended he be moved to a proposed new penal colony in South Africa. However the colonists already living there were not happy with this development and when the prisoners arrived they would not let the ship dock. It remained in the bay for many many months while messages were sent back and forth between the British authorities there and those in London. Mitchel wholeheartedly supported the colonists (who were openly verging on outright rebellion) in their struggle to prevent the penal colony from being set up.
They won the day and the prison ship was subsequently sent to Van Diemen’s Land, but because of unkind winds they ended up going via Brazil! This is where, from his prison ship, Mitchel first saw slaves. At this stage he was in this ship for well over a year and for much of that time he was perilously ill. Eventually he got to Van Diemen’s Land and rather than living in “horrendous conditions” there, after he promised not to escape, he was reunited with some of his fellow rebels, got set up on a farm where his wife and family joined him. Mitchel spent a number of very happy years there, raising his children, recovering his health and exploring the countryside with his fellow rebels (he was not supposed to meet up with them, but did anyway.)
Eventually he decided to escape, and being a man of honour he refused to slip off into he night because he had given his word he would not. So he went and told the police chief that he was rescinding his bond and intended to escape, which after a lot of drama, he did, and eventually got to America where he again was reunited with his family.
Much is made about his attitude to slavery which was horrendous, but his defense of slavery was rooted in his desire to show that the civil war was not about slavery. In this he was quite correct – slavery was not the reason for the civil war but was used by some, as Mitchel believed, as a red herring to disguise the true motives.
Mitchel almost regarded the civil war as a substitute war against Britain – he viewed the north or union as rich industrialists (Britain) forcing poorer farmers, laborers etc (Confederacy) into a union they did not want .
His attitude to slavery is such a contradiction to his views and actions for the downtrodden in Ireland – he fearlessly defended catholics (Mitchel was a protestant) in the north from Orange “justice” and sacrificed so much to aid the subjugated peasantry.
We must take into account the attitudes of the day – very few people thought black people were equal – even Arthur Griffith in a preface to one of Mitchel’s books which was republished at the start of the twentieth century he excused Mitchel’s views by saying that it was preposterous that an Irish nationalist should be vilified or expected to apologize for not viewing an African as an equal. Different times.
His American adventure aside Mitchel is one of our greatest patriots – his books “Jail Journal” and “The Last Conquest of Ireland” are worth reading and can be found free online. He should not be totally demonised over what he wrote about slavery – he did so many good things and confronted injustice in Ireland with lionhearted determination. He was a great inspiration to men like Pearse.
Is there still salves living on the island?
“It is thought that after his campaign in Ireland in the middle of the seventeenth century, Oliver Cromwell used Spike Island as a holding area for Irish Catholics who were being transported to work as indentured labourers on British plantations in the West Indies. ”
It is thought that after his campaign in Ireland in the middle of the seventeenth century, Oliver Cromwell used Spike Island as a holding area for Irish Catholics who were being transported to work as SLAVES on British plantations in the West Indies.
Fixed that for you. Capitalised for emphasis.
http://www.africaresource.com/rasta/sesostris-the-great-the-egyptian-hercules/the-irish-slave-trade-forgotten-white-slaves/
Brill. I spent 56 days detention on Spike for absence from the PDF when it was a military prison back in 76; great place, love it! Forth Mitchell I think it’s called!
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