Abstract
Good health is the result of a healthy lifestyle, where caring about physical activity and nutrition are key concerns. However, in today’s society, nutritional disorders are becoming increasingly frequent, affecting children, adults, and elderly people, mainly due to limited nutrition knowledge and the lack of a healthy lifestyle. A commonly adopted therapy to these imbalances is to monitor physical activity and daily habits, such as recording exercise or creating custom meal plans to count the amount of macronutrients and micronutrients acquired in each meal. Nowadays, many health tracking applications (HTA) have been developed that, for instance, record energy intake as well as users’ physiological parameters, or measure the physical activity during the day. However, most existing HTA do not have a uniform architectural design on top of which to build other applications and services. In this manuscript, we present system architecture intended to serve as a reference architecture for building HTA solutions. In order to validate the proposed architecture, we performed a preliminary evaluation with 15 well recognized experts in systems and software architecture from different entities around world and who have estimated that our proposal can generate architecture for HTA that is adequate, reliable, secure, modifiable, portable, functional, and with high conceptual integrity. In order to show the applicability of the architecture in different HTA, we developed two telemonitoring systems based on it, targeted to different tasks: nutritional coaching (Food4Living) and physical exercise coaching (TrainME). The purpose was to illustrate the kind of end-user monitoring applications that could be developed.
Highlights
Healthy aging involves the interaction between genes, environment, and lifestyle factors, good eating habits and regular physical activity
We present a modular architecture that serves as a basis and guidance to build telemonitoring and e-coaching health tracking applications (HTAs) in order to address the lack of reference software architectures in this field
Similar to Food4Living, TrainME is a particular instantiation of the architecture proposed in Section 3, inheriting from it the essential elements in each telemonitoring system, and expanding other specific components to the physical activity domain
Summary
Healthy aging involves the interaction between genes, environment, and lifestyle factors, good eating habits and regular physical activity. We present a modular architecture that serves as a basis and guidance to build telemonitoring and e-coaching health tracking applications (HTAs) in order to address the lack of reference software architectures in this field. This architecture provides key elements to support the automation of tasks for supervisors, automatic advice for usual guidelines, frequent questions to the monitored users, and detects the demotivation risk of monitored users [6]. Food4LivingApp, an app for mobile nutritional telemonitoring With these systems, we show how the components of the proposed architecture can be used as building blocks on top of which to implement health telemonitoring applications within a specific domain.
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