Profiling and personalization:Identifying individual needs to support healthy behaviour

Making permanent lifestyle changes towards healthier direction is not easy, since they require learning new routines to be fitted in everyday life and breaking bad habits. However, the underlying factors discouraging healthy behaviour as well as the drivers for behaviour change are different for each person. People differ in their interests, motivators, resources, and habits and the contexts they act in vary several times in a day. Hence, in order to support lifestyle changes these personal factors need to be considered, which in turn requires solutions tailored to each individual. Advanced personalization could be enabled with ICT, provided that the important behavioural and contextual factors are identified and maintained in a dynamic personal profile, i.e. Virtual Individual model