CTASS: an intelligent framework for personalized travel behaviour advice to cardiac patients

Abstract

Current cardiac rehabilitation programs intending to increase physical activity of patients suffer from a lack of knowledge about effective patient’s activity profiles and their associated behavior. This leads to the fact that therapies are not completely tailored to the patient, causing non-adherence to the proposed treatment schedule. An important potential for increasing the physical activity level of patients is available in their daily travel behaviour that can be made more active. To validate this potential, we propose a Cardiac Travel Advice Support System (CTASS) digital framework for personalized travel behaviour advice to cardiac patients. The travel behaviour of the group of patients whose actual physical activity level is expected to be too low is monitored by a smartphone application that objectifies their daily activity schedules. The data from the schedules is analysed semi-automatically by the CTASS. Based on this analysis, the doctor can provide a treatment that is personalized to the specific contexts of the patient. In this way, we try to optimize their travel-related physical activity. Moreover, we predict the risk of non-adherence to the therapy taking into account the derived characteristics of the patient.