A self-learning personalized feedback agent for motivating physical activity

An important aspect in the treatment of various chronic diseases is to optimise physical activity levels. We present a general approach for the implementation of an electronic Feedback Agent that serves as a personal coach for achieving and maintaining a healthy level of physical activity through sustainable behavioural change. The Feedback Agent is a self-learning, context aware, personalized software agent that runs on the user's Smartphone and uses an external inertial sensor to keep track of the user's level of physical activity throughout the day. We highlight the three important aspects of feedback in our framework: the timing, content and representation of given feedback messages. Tailoring and optimization of feedback timing and content is in an advanced stage of research, while the representation aspect is largely a matter of future work.