Towards Development of Ontology-Based Context-aware Persuasive Applications Promoting Physical Activity

Abstract

Modern lifestyle is becoming more sedentary. As a consequence, many ubiquitous computing and mobile technologies have been designed to motivate people towards more active lifestyles. The concept of context-awareness is one important aspect of ubiquitous computing technologies. Context-aware applications and devices can deliver relevantly specific information and services with respect to users' needs and well adapt to their constantly changing environment. Therefore, context-awareness is now becoming critical in the development of ubiquitous and mobile technologies encouraging physical fitness. However, appropriately exploiting, representing and managing contextual information poses a serious challenge. There is a need for a formal context model facilitating context sharing, knowledge reasoning, and interoperability among diverse systems. Ontology-based context modeling can address these issues. Therefore, the present thesis proposes as a solution, the concept of context ontology, called Extensible Context Ontology for Physical Activity (ECOPA), and the architecture, abbreviated as CAPPA, to facilitate the development of Context-Aware Persuasive applications promoting Physical Activity. Furthermore, an application prototype called ExePeEnhancer, has been built and verified through experimentations to demonstrate the effectiveness of development of applications based on the proposed architecture and ontology. The evaluation results have shown that ExePeEnhancer as a persuasive application that accounts for different contexts, exhibits more effectiveness than a persuasive application that does not take those contextual information into consideration.