A Flexible Knowledge-Based Architecture for Supporting the Adoption of Healthy Lifestyles with Persuasive Dialogs

Automatically monitoring and supporting healthy lifestyle is a recent research trend, fostered by the availability of low-cost monitoring devices, and it can significantly contribute to the prevention of chronic diseases deriving from incorrect diet and lack of physical activity. In this chapter, we present the use of Semantic Web technologies to build an architecture for supporting the monitoring of people and for persuading them to follow healthy lifestyles. Semantic technologies are used for modeling all relevant information and for fostering reasoning activities by combining user-generated data and domain knowledge. The output of reasoning activities feeds a dialog manager component in charge of engaging users with persuasive messages based on the user data, context, and goals, The architecture is designed to be easily portable across domains and has been preliminary evaluated within a user study involving 119 users. Observed results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed solution and opened the possibility of adopting our platform in wider contexts.