The purpose of this study is to create and establish an efficient and cost-effective solution to decrease the effects of sedentarism in pregnant women. Our team was given a propelling question, from which we had to narrow down our scope and conduct primary and secondary research to determine our ideal customers. The design of our study intends to imitate the development of a startup where ideas are created from scratch and the final deliverable is a business model plan that shows some sort of traction. Our first major finding is that a sedentary lifestyle can be treated without major challenges in low-risk pregnancies. We determined that uncertainty and lack of concise and clear information is one of the main causes of an increased level of sedentary behavior in low-risk pregnancies. A significant driver for women to do some sort of activity or exercise stems from feeling supported, which doesn’t necessarily come from their partner or couple, but instead from other women that are going to a similar process as them. There are apps in the market that intend to serve pregnant women; however, there is not one that incorporates a social aspect to achieve their goal. In conclusion, there is opportunity in the market for a socially integrated pregnancy fitness app. The Gleam concept has been consciously developed to decrease sedentary behavior through concise, clear, and reliable information and by encouraging women through a socialization platform.

The purpose of this study is to create and establish an efficient and cost-effective solution to decrease the effects of sedentarism in pregnant women. Our team was given a propelling question, from which we had to narrow down our scope and conduct primary and secondary research to determine our ideal customers. The design of our study intends to imitate the development of a startup where ideas are created from scratch and the final deliverable is a business model plan that shows some sort of traction. Our first major finding is that a sedentary lifestyle can be treated without major challenges in low risk pregnancies. We determined that uncertainty and lack of concise and clear information is one of the main causes of an increased level of sedentary behavior in low risk pregnancies. A significant driver for women to do some sort of activity or exercise stems from feeling supported, which doesn’t necessarily come from their partner or couple, but instead from other women that are going to a similar process as them. There are apps in the market that intend to serve pregnant women; however, there is not one that incorporates a social aspect to achieve their goal. In conclusion, there is opportunity in the market for a socially integrated pregnancy fitness app. The Gleam concept has been consciously developed to decrease sedentary behavior through concise, clear, and reliable information and by encouraging women through a socialization platform.

The purpose of this study is to create and establish an efficient and cost-effective solution to decrease the effects of sedentarism in pregnant women. Our team was given a propelling question, from which we had to narrow down our scope and conduct primary and secondary research to determine our ideal customers. The design of our study intends to imitate the development of a startup where ideas are created from scratch and the final deliverable is a business model plan that shows some sort of traction. Our first major finding is that a sedentary lifestyle can be treated without major challenges in low risk pregnancies. We determined that uncertainty and lack of concise and clear information is one of the main causes of an increased level of sedentary behavior in low risk pregnancies. A significant driver for women to do some sort of activity or exercise stems from feeling supported, which doesn’t necessarily come from their partner or couple, but instead from other women that are going through a similar process as them. There are apps in the market that intend to serve pregnant women; however, there is not one that incorporates a social aspect to achieve their goal. In conclusion, there is opportunity in the market for a socially integrated pregnancy fitness app. The Gleam concept has been consciously developed to decrease sedentary behavior through concise, clear, and reliable information and by encouraging women through a socialization platform.

In the past decade, the use of mobile applications, specifically mobile applications focused on improving the health and fitness of users, has increased exponentially. As more consumers look towards mobile health applications to improve their health through dieting, exercise, and weight management, it is important to analyze how the concept of gamification can encourage sustained interaction and approval of these health-focused applications. This thesis aims to understand the prevalence of gamification amongst a large sample of health and fitness applications, identify and code the gamification features used in these apps, and finally, understand how different gamification features relate to the popularity and willingness to advocate using eWOM on behalf of a mobile app.

As technological advancement increases and becomes more accessible to everyone around the world, many communities and support groups have begun to offer online options for their programs, whether it be a fitness program, online therapy group, or doctor’s appointment. With the COVID-19 pandemic affecting every country around the world, online and virtual communities have become more necessary than ever. Using personal experience from an online fitness community formed as a response to social isolation called“Barrett Healthy Minds, Healthy Bodies,” research was conducted to determine if online communities had the same effectiveness as in-person communities in reaching and maintaining individual health goals. Peer-reviewed scientific articles and research papers from many countries around the world were analyzed for demonstration and quantification of the efficacy of other online communities compared to in- person groups. In addition, the benefits and limitations of online communities were identified. Using all of the research and data collected, a novel fitness program was designed for implementation with an online synchronous group (OSG) and an online asynchronous option serving as a control to observe any differential adherence of participants to fitness goals. The proposed OSG consists of meetings and workouts through Zoom and is more interactive, even virtually. The control group had no interaction with others and completed the workouts alone. While this program was not distributed to the public and tested as part of this project, it was designed to be an optimized pilot program to test the impact of remote community engagement on goal attainment. It is predicted that the OSG would demonstrate improvement over control in better reaching goals and increased satisfaction with results. Scientific literature from a variety of disciplines discussed here informs this prediction.

Pathogenic drug resistance is a major global health concern. Thus, there is great interest in modeling the behavior of resistant mutations–how quickly they will rise in frequency within a population, and whether they come with fitness tradeoffs that can form the basis of treatment strategies. These models often depend on precise measurements of the relative fitness advantage (s) for each mutation and the strength of the fitness tradeoff that each mutation suffers in other contexts. Precisely quantifying s helps us create better, more accurate models of how mutants act in different treatment strategies. For example, P. falciparum acquires antimalarial drug resistance through a series of mutations to a single gene. Prior work in yeast expressing this P. falciparum gene demonstrated that mutations come with tradeoffs. Computational work has demonstrated the possibility of a treatment strategy which enriches for a particular resistant mutation that then makes the population grow poorly once the drug is removed. This treatment strategy requires knowledge of s and how it changes when multiple mutants are competing across various drug concentrations. Here, we precisely quantified s in varying drug concentrations for five resistant mutants, each of which provide varying degrees of drug resistance to antimalarial drugs. DNA barcodes were used to label each strain, allowing the mutants to be pooled together for direct competition in different concentrations of drug. This will provide data that can make the models more accurate, potentially facilitating more effective drug treatments in the future.