SimBody

Many of the top causes of death in the world are directly related to risk factors that can be avoided with changes in lifestyle behaviors. Computers with Internet access are widely available, and their multimedia capabilities show great potential for e-learning. Furthermore, most of the frequent Internet users already look for health related information online. This chapter presents an interactive simulator that educates people on how to mitigate the risk of cardiovascular diseases. The application is named SimBody and was initially developed in the context of a Master Thesis at Technical University of Lisbon (IST), in collaboration with ZPX, a multimedia software development company. SimBody allows the users to control the behaviors of an avatar. Besides showing the contribution of each decision towards the risk of cardiovascular diseases, it offers contextualized lifestyle advices and depicts the progression of atherosclerosis. After knowledge transmission tests, the majority of the participants stated that after using SimBody they are more aware of the dangers and intend to introduce changes to their lifestyle.