MyBehavior: Automatic Personalized Health Feedback from User Behaviors and Preferences using Smartphones

Mobile sensing systems have made significant advances in tracking human behavior. However, the development of personalized mobile health feedback systems is still in its infancy. This paper introduces MyBehavior, a smartphone application that takes a novel approach to generate deeply personalized health feedback. It combines state-of-the-art behavior tracking with algorithms that are used in recommendation systems. MyBehavior automatically learns a user's physical activity and dietary behavior and strategically suggests changes to those behaviors for a healthier lifestyle. The system uses a sequential decision making algorithm, Multiarmed Bandit, to generate suggestions that maximize calorie loss and are easy for the user to adopt. In addition, the system takes into account user's preferences to encourage adoption using the pareto-frontier algorithm. In a 14-week study, results show statistically significant increases in physical activity and decreases in food calorie when using MyBehavior compared to a control condition.