ABSTRACT
Seclusion and sedentary lifestyle are the main causes of many psychological and physical health problems. They may be among the top 10 causes of death and disability in the world. The pandemic crisis context of COVID has deepened these problems, especially for older adults who have been isolated, deprived of their relatives and of doing physical activities. In this paper, we introduce an adaptive, personalized, and context-aware persuasive platform to stimulate physical activities of older adults without deception or coercion. Our persuasion approach is customizable, in the sense that every older adult has its personal profile. It is also adaptive because it can use a persuasion loop to change the persuasion strategy when the older adult does not adhere to the proposed persuasion strategy. Furthermore, our persuasion approach is context-aware as it takes account of contextual location and weather information in the provision of the persuasion strategy. To validate our approach, we implemented "ActiveSenior”. Then, we carried out a large-scale challenge for one month to approve the results of our persuasive approach. The evaluation of the acceptance of our ActiveSenior system was encouraging as most of the interviewed participants were satisfied. In addition, the obtained results showed a marked improvement in the physical activity of older adults, quantified by the number of steps taken per day. © 2023 Elsevier B.V.