One of the main causes of numerous health problemsis a lack of physical activity. To promote a more active lifestyle,the Hanze University started a health promotion program. Participants were motivated to reach their daily goal of physical activityby means of an activity tracker in combination with two-weeklycoaching sessions. Employing the data of the experiment, weinvestigated the manners in which the predictability of physicalactivity of a participant during the day can be improved. Thecollected step count data was used to construct personalisedmachine learning models, by taking into account the differencebetween physical activities during weekdays on the one handand weekends on the other hand. The training of algorithmsper participant in combination with the time-slices weekdays,weekend and the whole week improves the accuracy of theprediction model. The performance of the models improveseven further when the individualised time-sliced models arecombined. More contextual data, like free time and workinghours, might even extend the accuracy. The use of personalisedprediction models, based on machine learning and time slices,could become an addition in preventive personalized eHealthsystems and mobile activity monitoring. For instance, this canconstitute as a viable addition to a virtual coaching system to helpthe participants to reach their daily goal. As the individualisedmodels allow for predictions of the progression of the physicalactivity during the day, they enable the virtual coaching systemto intervene at the appropriate moment in time.
Obesity is a fast growing societal threat, causing chronic conditions, physical and psychological health problems, as well as absenteeism and large healthcare costs. Despite numerous attempts to promote physical activity and healthy diet, existing interventions do not focus on often occurring emotional causes of obesity. There is a need for self-management support of this vulnerable target group: emotional eaters. This paper presents the results of the design case study focusing on a holistic development of a personalised virtual mHealth coach that provides self-management training ‘Denk je zèlf!’ (Dutch for ‘Develop a wise mind and counsel yourself’). Target group are young adults with emotional eating disorder and obesity. The contextual inquiry study was conducted to get insights into the needs and experiences of the target users, including interviews and questionnaires with emotional eaters, obesity treatment patients and healthcare practitioners. Personas and user stories were derived from these results and translated into a new ‘Denk je zèlf!’ virtual coach, based on Dialectical Behaviour Therapy and experience sampling measures to capture user experience and emotional state. This paper makes two main contributions: (a) combining holistic design with behaviour therapy in one virtual mHealth coaching application for emotional eaters; (b) applying Personas to guide the design. Preliminary results suggest that an online self-management training might be useful for the target group. Future research will be aimed at iterative evaluation and further development of the dialectical dialogues for the virtual coach and content for the education and instruction modules.
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 overweight populationis an emotional eater. Emotional eaters gain weight because ofpoor emotion regulation, not just due to bad eating habits. Weaim at developing a personalised virtual coach ‘Denk je zèlf!’providing support for self-regulation of emotions for obeseemotional eaters. This paper presents a research study protocolon validating persuasive coaching strategies in emotionregulation, based on Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, ultimatelytargeting behaviour change. Our goal is to design a personalisedeCoaching framework, allowing us to optimally translatesuccessful behaviour change mechanisms and techniques, suchas dialectical strategies, into personalised persuasive coachingstrategies.
LINK
