ProHealth eCoach: User-Centered Design and Development of an eCoach App to Promote Healthy Lifestyle with Personalized Activity Recommendations (Preprint)

Abstract

Regular physical activity (PA), healthy habits, and a healthy diet are recommended guidelines to maintain a healthy lifestyle. A healthy lifestyle can help to avoid chronic diseases and long-term illnesses. A monitoring and automatic personalized lifestyle recommendation system (i.e., automatic electronic coach or eCoach) with considering clinical and ethical guidelines, individual health status, condition, and preferences may successfully help participants to follow recommendations to maintain a healthy lifestyle. As a prerequisite for the prototype design of such a helpful eCoach system, it is essential to involve the end-users and subject-matter experts throughout the iterative design process.

This study proposes a user-centered design and development of an eCoach App (i.e., ProHealth eCoach) to promote a healthy lifestyle with personalized activity recommendations based on an iterative user-centered design (UCD) method. The objective is to explore the user needs for an eCoach system to stimulate a healthy lifestyle. The foremost principle of this ProHealth eCoach system is to reinforce positive behavior by persuasive strategies, such as self-monitoring of behavior, self-management, personalization, goal setting, reminder, rewards, tailored recommendation generation, and its effective presentation. Based on insights from a series of UCD workshops, we envisage PA as the basis for a healthy lifestyle and the development of the ProHealth eCoach system. However, regardless of the design and development of multiple PA apps in the Appstore and Playstore, it remains unclear how to design and develop an engaging and effective PA coaching app.

We used an iterative UCD approach with a dialogue-labs method to collect qualitative data from different users (i.e., researchers, non-technical and technical, health professionals, subject-matter experts, and potential end-users) to develop a roadmap for self-management with eCoaching. We designed and developed the eCoach prototype in two stages, adopting different phases of the UCD approach and co-design events. In UCD workshop 1, we focused on identifying end-users, understanding the user’s context, specifying user requirements, designing and developing an initial low-fidelity eCoach prototype. In UCD workshop 2, we focused on maturing the low-fidelity solution design and development for the visualization of continuous and discrete data, artificial intelligence (AI)-based interval forecasting, personalized recommendations, and activity goals.

The UCD approach helped to develop a working prototype of eCoach system that meets end-user's requirements and expectations towards an effective recommendation visualization, considering diversity in culture, quality of life, and human values. The design provides an early version of the solution, consisting of wearable technology, a mobile app, and web content for self-monitoring, goal setting, and lifestyle recommendations in an engaging manner between the eCoach app and end-users.

The adopted UCD approach brings in a design focus on the user and their needs at each phase. Throughout the design process, users have been involved at the heart of the design to create a working research prototype to improve the fit between technology, end-user, and researchers.

Not applicable.