Sufficient physical activity can reduce many adverse conditions and contribute to a healthy life. Nevertheless, inactivity is prevalent on an international scale. Improving physical activity is an essential concern for public health. Reminders that help people change their health behaviors are widely applied in health care services. However, timed-based reminders deliver periodic prompts suffer from flexibility and dependency issues which may decrease prompt effectiveness. We propose a fuzzy logic prompting mechanism, Accumulated Activity Effective Index Reminder (AAEIReminder), based on pattern recognition and activity effective analysis to manage physical activity. AAEIReminder recognizes activity levels using a smartphone-embedded sensor for pattern recognition and analyzing the amount of physical activity in activity effective analysis. AAEIReminder can infer activity situations such as the amount of physical activity and days spent exercising through fuzzy logic, and decides whether a prompt should be delivered to a user. This prompting system was implemented in smartphones and was used in a short-term real-world trial by seventeenth participants for validation. The results demonstrated that the AAEIReminder is feasible. The fuzzy logic prompting mechanism can deliver prompts automatically based on pattern recognition and activity effective analysis. AAEIReminder provides flexibility which may increase the prompts' efficiency.
Keywords: activity recognition; fuzzy logic; mobile health; prompt; smartphones.