Personalization of Wearable-Based Exergames with Continuous Player Modeling

In recent years, sedentary behavior has been recognized as a major lifestyle-related health risk. Meanwhile, exergames and gamification of physical activities are effective tools to motivate behavior change, particularly to promote daily physical activities. Research has shown that persuasive technologies and gamification can be utilized to increase physical activity. On the other hand, studies have suggested that "one-size-fits-all" approach does not work well for persuasive game design. At the same time, player modeling and recommender systems are increasingly used for personalizing contents and services.However, there are few existing works on how to build comprehensive player models for personalizing gamified systems and recommending daily physical activities, as well as on the long-term effectiveness of gamified exercise-promoting systems. To fill these gaps, a new approach for gamified 24/7 fitness recommendation systems is introduced in this research. It uses wearable activity trackers combined with continuous player modeling to provide personalized activity recommendations and generates gamified contents targeted at individual user.Preliminary results show the feasibility of using wearable activity trackers for gamification of physical activities, as well as the effectiveness of using player modeling for generating personalized exercise recommendations. We show that personalizing recommendations using player modeling and gamification with wearables could improve users' engagement and motivation towards fitness activities over time.