Among runners, there is a high drop-out rate due to injuries and loss of motivation. These runners often lack personalized guidance and support. While there is much potential for sports apps to act as (e-)coaches to help these runners to avoid injuries, set goals, and maintain good intentions, most available running apps primarily focus on persuasive design features like monitoring, they offer few or no features that support personalized guidance (e.g., personalized training schemes). Therefore, we give a detailed description of the working mechanism of Inspirun e-Coach app and on how this app uses a personalized coaching approach with automatic adaptation of training schemes based on biofeedback and GPS-data. We also share insights into how end-users experience this working mechanism. The primary conclusion of this study is that the working mechanism (if provided with accurate data) automatically adapts training sessions to the runners’ physical workload and stimulates runners’ goal perception, motivation, and experienced personalization. With this mechanism, we attempted to make optimal use of the potential of wearable technology to support the large group of novice or less experienced runners and that by providing insight in our working mechanisms, it can be applied in other technologies, wearables, and types of sports.
There is a growing number of eHealth interventionsaiming at enhancing lifestyle to address obesity. However, theexisting interventions do not take the emotional aspects ofobesity into account. Forty percent of the overweightpopulation is an emotional eater. Emotional eaters gain weightbecause of poor emotion regulation, not just due to bad eatinghabits. We aim at developing a personalized virtual coach‘Denk je zèlf!’ providing support for self-regulation ofemotions for young obese emotional eaters. This paperpresents an eCoaching model and a research study protocolaiming at the validation of persuasive coaching strategies basedon behavior change techniques. Ultimately, we aim atdesigning a personalized eCoaching framework, allowing us tooptimally translate successful behavior change mechanismsand techniques, such as dialectical strategies, into personalizedpersuasive coaching strategies.
Self-management is widely seen as a viable contribution to sustainable health care as it allows to promote physical and mental well-being. A promising approach to promoting a healthy lifestyle is the deployment of personalized virtual coaches, especially in combination with the latest developments in the fields of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. This paper presents a framework for a virtual coaching system, as well as a use case in which parts of this framework are applied. The virtual coach in the use case aims to encourage customer contact center employees to protect their mental health. This article outlines one part of the use-case in particular, viz. how to promote employee autonomy and supervisor support by, inter alia, monitoring employees’ levels of emotional exhaustion. Current systems focus on providing users with insight in their health status or behavior, the authors developed the functional architecture for a system that can be implemented for different goals and generates personalized, real-time advice based on the combination of user preferences, motivational success and predicted user behavior.
