Wellness & lifestyle server: A platform for anthropometric and lifestyle data analysis

Abstract

Health self-tracking has become a popular research issue in recent years. This interest is due to a number of partially related causes, such as the increase in the number of people with long-term health conditions, the growing importance of self-care, the spread of miniaturised and easy-to-use measuring devices and smartphone applications and the availability of social networking platforms. With some basic computer skills and a few low-cost gadgets, it is relatively easy to produce and share an amount of personal health information unimaginable only a few years ago. Within the project SmartHealth 2.0 we have realised a wellness platform aimed at supporting the prevention of an individual’s unhealthy behaviors and the monitoring of his/her lifestyle habits. The platform consists of a suite of apps specialized for specific areas of wellness, and a remote component that we have called the Wellness & LifeStyle Server (WLS). In this paper we have detailed the design and the development of this innovative platform.