Machine learning and ontology in eCoaching for personalized activity level monitoring and recommendation generation

Leading a sedentary lifestyle may cause numerous health problems. Therefore, passive lifestyle changes should be given priority to avoid severe long-term damage. Automatic health coaching system may help people manage a healthy lifestyle with continuous health state monitoring and personalized recommendation generation with machine learning (ML). This study proposes a semantic ontology model to annotate the ML-prediction outcomes and personal preferences to conceptualize personalized recommendation generation with a hybrid approach. We use a transfer learning approach to improve ML model training and its performance, and an incremental learning approach to handle daily growing data and fit them into the ML models. Furthermore, we propose a personalized activity recommendation algorithm for a healthy lifestyle by combining transfer learning, incremental learning, the proposed semantic ontology model, and personal preference data. For the overall experiment, we use public and private activity datasets collected from healthy adults (n = 33 for public datasets; n = 16 for private datasets). The standard ML algorithms have been used to investigate the possibility of classifying daily physical activity levels into the following activity classes: sedentary (0), low active (1), active (2), highly active (3), and rigorous active (4). The daily step count, low physical activity, medium physical activity, and vigorous physical activity serve as input for the classification models. We first use publicly available Fitbit datasets to build the initial classification models. Subsequently, we re-use the pre-trained ML classifiers on the private MOX2-5 dataset using transfer learning. We test several standard algorithms and select the best-performing model with optimized configuration for our use case by empirical testing. We find that DecisionTreeClassifier with a criterion "entropy” outperforms other ML classifiers with a mean accuracy score of 97.50% (F1 = 97.00, precision = 97.00, recall = 98.00, MCC = 96.78) and 96.10% (F1 = 96.00, precision = 96.00, recall = 96.00, MCC = 96.10) in Fitbit and MOX2-5 datasets, respectively. Using transfer learning, the DecisionTreeClassifier with a criterion "entropy" outperforms other classifiers with a mean accuracy score of 97.99% (F1 = 98.00, precision = 98.00, recall = 98.00, MCC = 96.79). Therefore, the transfer learning approach improves the machine learning model performance by ≈ 1.98% for defined datasets and settings on MOX2-5 datasets. The Hermit reasoner outperforms other reasoners with an average reasoning time of 1.1–2.1 s, under defined settings in our proposed ontology model. Our proposed algorithm for personalized recommendations conceptualizes a direction to combine the classification results and personal preferences in an ontology for activity eCoaching. The proposed method of combining machine learning technology with semantic rules is an invaluable asset in personalized recommendation generation. Moreover, the semantic rules in the knowledge base and SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) query processing in the query engine helps to understand the logic behind the personalized recommendation generation.