BECOME: A Modular Recommender System for Coaching and Promoting Empowerment in Healthcare

Abstract

In this chapter, we present BECOME (Behavior Change recOMender systEm), a modular Recommender System built to cope with issues like personalization, adaptation, and delivery of contents pertinently designed to solve idiosyncrasies of various topics in the healthcare field. The main objective is to empower citizens or patients to make informed decisions to improve their health condition. It deals with a double-edged personalization process as one of the key aspects to fostering self-empowerment: content dynamically personalized and adapted as new information is gathered and flexibility in the strategies and timings of the delivery. Thus, we take personalization one step further by not only tailoring the content, which is the standard customization strategy, but also adapting its timings and complexity in a dynamic manner while dealing with the feeling of having an entity (the coach) behind, ready to help. To show the modularity of the system and the diverse ways of interaction, different studies representing various use cases are presented.