Walking Route Recommendation System for Taking a Walk as Health Promotion

This paper proposes a walking route recommendation system aiming at continuously supporting a user to take a walk as means for health promotion. In recent years, taking a walk becomes popular with not only the elderly, but also those from all ages as one of the easiest ways for health promotion. The proposed system supports users to take a walk as daily exercise by recommending a walking route that can consume target calories. When it is going to be used for long period of time, it should consider the case when a user will not follow the recommended route. We think it will often happen when a user gradually gets bored with taking a walk during a long period of time. In order to solve the problem, the proposed method implicitly manages calories on monthly basis and recommends walking routes that could keep a user from getting bored. The Effectiveness of the recommendation algorithm is evaluated with agent simulation. This paper also proposes a navigation interface that presents direction to the next visiting point without using a map. It is evaluated by an experiment with test participants.