Trattner Christoph, Schäfer Hanna, Said Alan, Ludwig Bernd, Elsweiler David
2016
Busy lifestyles, abundant options, lack of knowledge ... there are many reasons why people make poor decisions relating to their health. Yet these poor decisions are leading to epidemics, which represent some of the greatest challenges we face as a society today. Noncommunicable Diseases (NCDs), which include cardiovascular diseases, cancer, chronic respiratory diseases and diabetes, account for ∼60% of total deaths worldwide. These diseases share the same four behavioural risk factors: tobacco use, unhealthy diet, physical inactivity and harmful consumption of alcohol and can be prevented and sometimes even reversed with simple lifestyle changes. Eating more healthily, exercising more appropriately, sleeping and relaxing more, as well as simply being more aware of one’s state of health are all things that would lead to improved health. Yet knowing exactly what to change and how, implementing changes and maintaining changes over long time periods are all things people find challenging. These are also problems, for which we believe recommender systems can provide assistance by offering specific, tailored suggestions for behavioural change. In recent years recommender systems for health has become a popular topic within the RecSys community and a selection of empirical contributions and demo systems have been published. Efforts to date, however have been sporadic and lack coordination. We lack shared infrastructure such as datasets, appropriate cross-disciplinary knowledge, even agreed upon goals. It is our aim to use this workshop as a vehicle to: