Physical activity and diet are two key factors for a healthy lifestyle. Both are not only difficult to modify for people on the long-term difficult, they are also difficult to measure. The novelty of this program lies in combining the monitoring in real-life through sensors (food intake, physical activity and health parameters) with development of design interventions at different levels of the system (person, group, society), and evaluation of the (long-term) effectiveness of these combined interventions.
This program aims at addressing the following research questions:
- How can sensor data, gathered at different levels in a system (at the individual, in the household, in an environment), be combined to design more effective lifestyle interventions?
- How can momentary measurements (e.g., activity, health parameters, thoughts, mood) be used to dynamically adapt effective lifestyle interventions?
- How can technology support individualized coaching processes?
- How can we design and validate systems and services that prevent chronic illnesses?
- How can we design interventions that bridge the personal and social sphere (such as nuclear families) and will such interventions be more effective than those targeted at individuals?
- How can we enrich existing survey-based field data of high-risk populations with real-life, realtime sensor data?
- How can we measure long-term, real-life impact by using novel approaches to longitudinal field research?