Personalized Recommendations for Physical Activity e-Coaching (OntoRecoModel): Ontological Modeling

Abstract

Background Automatic e-coaching may motivate individuals to lead a healthy lifestyle with early health risk prediction, personalized recommendation generation, and goal evaluation. Multiple studies have reported on uninterrupted and automatic monitoring of behavioral aspects (such as sedentary time, amount, and type of physical activity); however, e-coaching and personalized feedback techniques are still in a nascent stage. Current intelligent coaching strategies are mostly based on the handcrafted string messages that rarely individualize to each user’s needs, context, and preferences. Therefore, more realistic, flexible, practical, sophisticated, and engaging strategies are needed to model personalized recommendations. Objective This study aims to design and develop an ontology to model personalized recommendation message intent, components (such as suggestion, feedback, argument, and follow-ups), and contents (such as spatial and temporal content and objects relevant to perform the recommended activities). A reasoning technique will help to discover implied knowledge from the proposed ontology. Furthermore, recommendation messages can be classified into different categories in the proposed ontology. Methods The ontology was created using Protégé (version 5.5.0) open-source software. We used the Java-based Jena Framework (version 3.16) to build a semantic web application as a proof of concept, which included Resource Description Framework application programming interface, World Wide Web Consortium Web Ontology Language application programming interface, native tuple database, and SPARQL Protocol and Resource Description Framework Query Language query engine. The HermiT (version 1.4.3.x) ontology reasoner available in Protégé 5.x implemented the logical and structural consistency of the proposed ontology. To verify the proposed ontology model, we simulated data for 8 test cases. The personalized recommendation messages were generated based on the processing of personal activity data in combination with contextual weather data and personal preference data. The developed ontology was processed using a query engine against a rule base to generate personalized recommendations. Results The proposed ontology was implemented in automatic activity coaching to generate and deliver meaningful, personalized lifestyle recommendations. The ontology can be visualized using OWLViz and OntoGraf. In addition, we developed an ontology verification module that behaves similar to a rule-based decision support system to analyze the generation and delivery of personalized recommendation messages following a logical structure. Conclusions This study led to the creation of a meaningful ontology to generate and model personalized recommendation messages for physical activity coaching.