RT journal article
T1 General Architecture for Development of Virtual Coaches for Healthy Habits Monitoring and Encouragement
A1 Benítez-Guijarro, Antonio
A1 Ruiz Zafra, Ángel
A1 Callejas, Zoraida
A1 Medina Medina, Nuria
A1 Benghazi, Kawtar
A1 Noguera, Manuel
K1 telemonitoring
K1 healthy habits
K1 virtual coaches
K1 systems and software architectures
K1 software architecture evaluation
K1 software development
AB Good health is the result of a healthy lifestyle, where caring about physical activityand nutrition are key concerns. However, in today’s society, nutritional disorders are becomingincreasingly frequent, affecting children, adults, and elderly people, mainly due to limited nutritionknowledge and the lack of a healthy lifestyle. A commonly adopted therapy to these imbalancesis to monitor physical activity and daily habits, such as recording exercise or creating custom mealplans 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 energyintake 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 buildother applications and services. In this manuscript, we present system architecture intended to serveas 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 softwarearchitecture from different entities around world and who have estimated that our proposal cangenerate architecture for HTA that is adequate, reliable, secure, modifiable, portable, functional, andwith high conceptual integrity. In order to show the applicability of the architecture in differentHTA, we developed two telemonitoring systems based on it, targeted to different tasks: nutritionalcoaching (Food4Living) and physical exercise coaching (TrainME). The purpose was to illustrate thekind of end-user monitoring applications that could be developed.Keywords: telemonitoring; healthy habits; virtual coaches; systems
PB MDPI
SN 1424-8220
YR 2019
FD 2019-01
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10498/21339
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10498/21339
LA eng
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Cádiz
RD 07-nov-2026