Ontological modeling of motivational messages for physical activity coaching

Abstract

Smart coaching systems are named to play a central role in both prevention and intervention strategies for behavioral change. While relevant progresses have been made in terms of automatic and continuous monitoring of behavioral aspects, e.g. amount and variety of physical activity, coaching and feedback techniques are still in an infancy stage. Current smart coaching strategies are mostly based on handcrafted messages which hardly personalize to the needs, context and preferences of each user. In order to make these recommendations more realistic, engaging and effective more flexible and sophisticated strategies are needed. This paper presents an ontology-based approach to model personalizable motivational messages for promoting healthy physical activity. The proposed ontology not only models the message intention and its components, e.g. argument, feedback or followup, but also its content, i.e. action, place, time or object required to perform the recommended activity. Through this ontology the messages can also be categorized into multiple classes, e.g. sedentary, mild or vigorous activities, and retrieved based on the preferences, needs and context of the user. Additional information not explicitly present on the messages can be inferred from the ontology by applying reasoning techniques and used to enhance the message retrieval process.