eHealth Initiatives for The Promotion of Healthy Lifestyle and Allied Implementation Difficulties

Research in eHealth has opened a new dimension to improve personal healthcare with the help of information and communication technologies (ICT). eHealth is an ‘umbrella term’ for the use of ICT for health. Remote care-giving technologies (mHealth, Telehealth, Telemedicine) are an extended branch of eHealth initiatives. The concept of health e- Coaching is another promising initiative of eHealth research for real-time personalized lifestyle support. The focus of eHealth initiatives is to deliver high quality, evidence-based, secure, cost- effective, timely care to support people for sustaining a healthy lifestyle. However, the practical implementation of different eHealth initiatives has often been challenging to establish prophesied benefit. Health monitoring and fitness coaching with artificial intelligence will rule the coming decades. The pillars of e-Coaching initiatives are data collection, analysis of data, recommendation (sending the right message to the right people in the right context) and data security. An optimized system for health e-Coaching, management of a huge amount of health data, ensuring data protection are some big challenges to the eHealth researchers. Prediction of human psychology for effective e-Coaching recommendation is another level of difficulty to overcome as human behavior is constantly changing. Different eHealth initiatives for the promotion of healthy lifestyle and its implementation difficulties have been our primary focus of the review in this paper. This paper is a result of our early stage research related to ‘Health e-Coaching recommendation system generation’. This paper will help young eHealth researchers to have a holistic idea on different eHealth technologies, initiatives till date for the promotion of healthy lifestyle and associated implementation challenges to overcome in the future.