CarpeDiem: Exploring health pillars to define a holistic recommender system to accomplish a sutainable change in lifestlye habits

Abstract

To live longer, healthier, and more active, people at any age have to follow simple and clear suggestions that cover the 3 main pillars of health: physical activity, nutrition, and sleeping. Unfortunately, due to the intrinsic (e.g., daily-life habits) and extrinsic (e.g., environmental change) factors, people are far to have a healthy life and, thus, there is an increase of chronic diseases, mental disorders, and premature death. This paper presents the approach followed in CarpeDiem, an IoT-based system focused on self-management as a way to engage and empower citizens in order to improve their quality of life and to allow a better follow-up of their own health. The CarpeDiem self-management system is intelligent and autonomous, and it is aimed at monitoring physical-and sleeping-activity, nutrition, as well as environmental data and lifestyle habits, with the final goal of providing personalized recommendations and nudges to foster behaviour change towards healthier behaviours. CarpeDiem system currently designed to provide individual recommendations in each one of the domains. However, there is increasing evidence that these three pillars influence each other. Subsequently, the final goal of the application is to assemble the information provided by the three pillars together and supply holistic recommendations to the users to induce a meaningful and enduring change in their behaviours. The purpose of this study is to analyze the existing associations between the three mentioned pillars, by using data from a previous pilot and current state of the art, to later design intelligent recommendations capable of producing lasting behavioural changes in the user’s community.