Design of a Framework for Wellness Determination and Subsequent Recommendation with Personal Informatics

Due to the advances in medical science, increasing health consciousness, improved quality of food, the average human life span has increased to a great extent. On the other hand, stresses of modern life, overwork and less sleep, increased usage of digital devices and internet, less exercise, are leading us to poor quality of life. Elderly people are more vulnerable to reduced life quality due to deterioration of both physical and mental health. People at any age need to maintain a minimum level of wellbeing to pursue his or her daily activities to lead a fulfilling life. Thus the need of assessing and restoring wellness is very important. Fortunately the progress of information and communication technologies provide use sensor devices and computing platform to feel, monitor and restore the wellness. In this work, a study has been done to define and determine wellness related to daily activities data obtained from various sensors and provide recommendation to the user regarding improvement of life style to achieve wellness. A small-scale experiment has been done using a simple lifelog device. The daily activities data including walking steps, sleep time, inactive period, calories burned are collected from 8 subjects. In addition food intake, eating times, cell phone usage, messaging time, time of interaction with other people and solo time are also manually collected. The correlation of physical activities (walking time, exercise time), mental activities (cell phone usage, study time, interaction with friends) and sleep patterns are studied. A simple parameter Tiredness Factor has been proposed to determine wellness and a recommendation system for improving wellness has been developed. Questionnaire from the subjects about the personal feelings of wellness has been noted and used to evaluate our proposal.