A Personal Home Office Helper

Abstract

In recent decades, the sedentary lifestyle has become more and more widespread, both in home life and office work. During the COVID-19 pandemic, working from home became the norm for long months in many countries around the world due to lockdowns, and though home office work can be beneficial in certain aspects, unfortunately it more often than not comes with an inactive lifestyle. The potential negative health effects of spending lengthy time periods sitting or lying down with little to no exercise (such as chronic diseases and mental health problems) has been extensively researched and documented. Numerous studies have shown that introducing breaks is important to reduce the chance of negative health effects at some degree, but when the task at hand requires focus and undivided attention, watching time for breaks can be quite difficult. Furthermore, insufficient water-intake and an unhealthy diet are also often negative side effects of a sedentary lifestyle.In this paper, a novel Intelligent Space-based application framework is proposed that aims to help users with a sedentary work-and lifestyle in improving their health: helping the user with time management (notifying them about breaks, scheduled water-intake, etc.); providing information about dietary intake and providing recommendations about introducing small, incremental changes in their diet; and finding patterns in the observed behavior of the user in order to inform them about unconscious (and potentially harmful) habits.