Towards physical activity support community

Nowadays it is recognized that physical activity, besides other lifestyles, has indisputable beneficial affects on cardiovascular diseases prevention and treatment. Additionally the social support is important and has a valuable impact on the outcomes in cardiovascular disease patients. To provide the patients the social support needed and, to support and motivate them in their daily physical activity, we are working on building a mobile virtual community for physical activity support connected to a triaxial accelerometer, where the physical activity will be monitored and the main objective will be to motivate and support the patients to be adequately physically active. In this paper, the main functionalities supported by the community are discussed and the instrumental support is also investigated and metrics, based on the IMA metric, are proposed.