New online global Adventures promote healthy lifestyles

Aug. 16, 2012 - PRLog -- Activ8rlives launches its new Adventures game to add to its social network-based health and wellness system. Adventures helps groups of people to explore the World using the stunning satellite images from Google EarthTM – travelling along the route they have planned by being active every day.

Each group can plan a number of routes between any starting and finishing position on the globe. Routes can be straight lines or they can follow roads, rivers, cities, mountain ranges, golf courses, animal migration routes, famous trails, historic sites, art museums or locations of corporate subsidiaries’ following the terrain of Google Earths’ beautiful 3D topography maps. Group members can zoom down to their current location to explore the cities they are travelling through, see famous landmarks, check-out golf courses’ fly along valleys, soar over snow covered peaks or journey as a school class to visit partner schools located on different continents.

Each member contributes to the group’s journey steps by uploading their activity data from their Activ8rlives’ step counter, or they can enter it manually into their account – so no purchase is required to be a member of Activ8rlives or to use Adventures. The combined distance travelled along the planned route are shown to all members of the group in real-time.

Families, educators, youth group leaders and corporate wellness advocates can design their own routes to support local educational or corporate themes. There are no restrictions on where a group can travel to or how many adventures can be created.

The emphasis of this travel game is co-operation rather than competition and on the promotion of long-term engagement as opposed to short-term competitive challenges or races. The pace of progress along a route is set by the group’s collective level of activity. There are no time limits or imposed start or stop dates.  Groups may begin their adventure whenever they choose, take as long as they wish and take it one day at a time!

Adventures can be used by anyone of any level of fitness or sporting ability. It is ideally suited to those who do not consider themselves to be good at sports or who feel excluded from competitive sporting activities, but want to be active and healthy.



Notes to Editors:  Why add Adventures?

Being active and maintaining an appropriate weight, are the cornerstones of staying well and keeping healthy.  The London 2012 Games were an inspiration. They demonstrated how hard work and dedication by the athletes over many years, along with the support of their families and team mates, made it possible to achieve excellence in human performance.

Most of us will never be World-class gymnasts, track athletes or tennis champions. But all of us need to be active and remain active throughout our lives. This is not about crash diets or a short-term competitions.

Being consistently active makes positive contributions toward our ability to fight-off infection and significantly lessens the risks of heart disease, diabetes and cancer by up to 40% (Cancer Research, UK). Being active lifts our mood and helps us maintain mental as well as physical health and wellbeing. However, being active has to be consistent, which means that it must be sustainable within our busy daily schedules.

Health guidelines recommend 60 active minutes a day for young people or 150 minutes per week for older adults. Activ8rlives’ activity monitors record the amount of activity we do each day. With its group-centric social network, Activ8rlives enables people to organise into groups (families, friends, classes, schools, departments or companies) to encourage each other to be active, achieve an appropriate weight and to maintain a healthy lifestyle, by incorporating “bouts” of activity within our working day and around our family and home lives.

Activ8rlives emphasises the use of self-monitoring as a way of changing our behaviour and this helps in adopting new positive habits – what is called social cognitive behaviour or “mindfulness” – being aware of our habits and ways of making positive changes when needed.

By self-monitoring our activity and being mindful of the requirement to achieve our daily “dose” of activity, we tend to do more; most users typically double their levels of activity when they begin self-monitoring with a sophisticated accelerometer which has to be accurate for the wearer to consider it believable.

As we do more, we feel healthier and start to feel the benefits of getting fit. But staying engaged can be a struggle and we are more likely to stick with it if we connect being active with our social or family networks.

Activ8rlives provides an infrastructure for people to work within their networks (and create new ones) while contributing data anonymously, which is used to play games. No other user is allowed to see the data of another – only the pooled group data such as the average steps per day, distance walked this month, average calories used, average weight lost etc., can be viewed by group members.

Adventures is therefore one of many ways in which Activ8rlives retains engagement and makes being active a sociable activity.