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.
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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.
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The shift toward prevention and self-management in health hinges upon a massive realization of behavior change, which involves the use of virtual coaches. Increasing availability of data from mobile devices and techniques for real time analysis provide new opportunities for personalizing virtual coaches. We propose an architecture that takes advantage of those developments. We identify the required knowledge and methods to develop a flexible ecosystem for rapid prototyping of personalized virtual coaches.
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