General Architecture for Development of Virtual Coaches for Healthy Habits Monitoring and Encouragement

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2019-01Source
Sensors 2019, 19 (1), 108Abstract
Good health is the result of a healthy lifestyle, where caring about physical activity
and nutrition are key concerns. However, in today’s society, nutritional disorders are becoming
increasingly frequent, affecting children, adults, and elderly people, mainly due to limited nutrition
knowledge and the lack of a healthy lifestyle. A commonly adopted therapy to these imbalances
is to monitor physical activity and daily habits, such as recording exercise or creating custom meal
plans to count the amount of macronutrients and micronutrients acquired in each meal. Nowadays,
many health tracking applications (HTA) have been developed that, for instance, record energy
intake as well as users’ physiological parameters, or measure the physical activity during the day.
However, most existing HTA do not have a uniform architectural design on top of which to build
other applications and services. In this manuscript, we present system architecture intended to serve
as a reference architecture for building HTA solutions. In order to validate the proposed architecture,
we performed a preliminary evaluation with 15 well recognized experts in systems and software
architecture from different entities around world and who have estimated that our proposal can
generate architecture for HTA that is adequate, reliable, secure, modifiable, portable, functional, and
with high conceptual integrity. In order to show the applicability of the architecture in different
HTA, we developed two telemonitoring systems based on it, targeted to different tasks: nutritional
coaching (Food4Living) and physical exercise coaching (TrainME). The purpose was to illustrate the
kind of end-user monitoring applications that could be developed.
Keywords: telemonitoring; healthy habits; virtual coaches; systems
Subjects
telemonitoring; healthy habits; virtual coaches; systems and software architectures; software architecture evaluation; software developmentCollections
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