An Exploration of Social Requirements for Exercise Group Formation

By Mike Wu, Abhishek Ranjan, and Khai N. Truong

Summary:
This paper discussed a need for a solution to finding exercise partners and what the characteristics that this system would need to have in order to function appropriately. It started off detailing some of the positive aspects of exercising followed by the study in which the authors conducted. Their study was done in two parts, the first being an online questionnaire in which approximately 100 participants were involved, followed by two small focus groups to reflect on the results of the questionnaire and to bring in some more specific data. The main goal of the study was to answer the following questions:

1. Do people who exercise have partners? If so, how did they find them?
2. If people do not have exercise partners, what are the reasons?
3. What happens when people do not have an exercise partner?
4. What do people look for in their ideal exercise partner?
5. What information would people be willing to share to find compatible exercise partners?

After the initial questionnaire phase the two focus groups were invoked to get a better understanding to some of the answers given. With these focus groups they were able to narrow down the underlying issues such as what characteristics are involved in finding an ideal exercise partner and what information people are willing to share in order to do this. The conclusion of their work is best described by this insert from the paper:

"We found that for our participants, (1) collaboration among exercise partners is a two-phase process: discovery of common activities and subsequent collaboration, (2) there are temporal variations in privacy levels in opportunistic types of exercise collaboration, (3) lack of a partner can affect the perceived quality of the exercise experience, (4) skill range, location, and schedule similarity are key criteria for compatible partners, and (5) there is a willingness to share some personal information to enable spontaneous exercise."

Discussion:
I am glad that a study is being done to see what kind of system is needed to help people in finding exercise partners. I think exercising is becoming increasing important especially with the health issues our nation is facing and some of the points they made about the benefits of working with a partner are well justified. I think a paper like this could easily lead to some sort of social site for finding activities and exercise partners by locality, or perhaps as like a feature/plugin on existing social sites like facebook.