Contextual motivation in physical activity by means of association rule mining

Abstract

The primary thrust of this work is to demonstrate the applicability of association rule mining in public health domain, focusing on physical activity and exercising. In this paper, the concept of association rule mining is shown assisting to promote the physical exercise as regular human activity. Specifically, similar to the prototypical example of association rule mining, market basket analysis, our proposed novel approach considers two events – exercise (sporadic) and sleep (regular) as the two items of the frequent set; and associating the former, exercise event, with latter, the daily occurring activity sleep at night, helps strengthening the frequency of the exercise patterns. The regularity can further be enhanced, if the exercising instruments are kept in the vicinity of the bed and are within easy reach