ProHealth eCoach: User-Centered Design and Development of an eCoach App to Promote Healthy Lifestyle with Personalized Activity Recommendations

Abstract

Background Regular physical activity (PA), healthy habits, and a healthy diet are recommended guidelines to maintain a healthy lifestyle. A healthy lifestyle can help to avoid chronic diseases and long-term illnesses. A monitoring and automatic personalized lifestyle recommendation system (i.e., automatic electronic coach or eCoach) with considering clinical and ethical guidelines, individual health status, condition, and preferences may successfully help participants to follow recommendations to maintain a healthy lifestyle. As a prerequisite for the prototype design of such a helpful eCoach system, it is essential to involve the end-users and subject-matter experts throughout the iterative design process. Methods We used an iterative user-centered design (UCD) approach with a dialogue-labs method to collect qualitative data from different users (i.e., researchers, non-technical and technical, health professionals, subject-matter experts, and potential end-users) to develop a roadmap for self-management with eCoaching. We designed and developed the eCoach prototype in two stages, adopting different phases of the UCD approach and co-design events. In UCD workshop 1, we focused on identifying end-users, understanding the user’s context, specifying user requirements, designing and developing an initial low-fidelity eCoach prototype. In UCD workshop 2, we focused on maturing the low-fidelity solution design and development for the visualization of continuous and discrete data, artificial intelligence (AI)-based interval forecasting, personalized recommendations, and activity goals. Results The UCD approach helped to develop a working prototype of eCoach system that meets end-user's requirements and expectations towards an effective recommendation visualization, considering diversity in culture, quality of life, and human values. The design provides an early version of the solution, consisting of wearable technology, a mobile app, and web content for self-monitoring, goal setting, and lifestyle recommendations in an engaging manner between the eCoach app and end-users. Conclusions The adopted UCD approach brings in a design focus on the user and their needs at each phase. Throughout the design process, users have been involved at the heart of the design to create a working research prototype to improve the fit between technology, end-user, and researchers. Furthermore, we performed a technological readiness study of ProHealth eCoach against standard levels set by European Union (EU). Trial Registration: Not Applicable.

HL7 FHIR with SNOMED-CT to Achieve Semantic and Structural Interoperability in Personal Health Data: A Proof-of-Concept Study

“…This section gives a detailed analysis and explanation of a tethered PHR mobile application, (e.g., the health eCoach system [ 49 , 50 , 51 , 52 , 53 , 54 ]) design and its implementation. We have used HL7 FHIR, HAPI library, SNOMED-CT, and PostgreSQL to ensure a bi-directional communication between the eCoach mobile app and PostgreSQL and used API security methods [ 55 , 56 ] to protect HAPI REST APIs.…”