Towards Physical Activity Support Community Lamia Elloumi Biomedical Signals and Systems Group, University of Twente Enschede, the Netherlands Email: L.Elloumi@utwente.nl Bert-Jan van Beijnum Biomedical Signals and Systems Group, University of Twente Enschede, the Netherlands Email: B.J.F.vanBeijnum@utwente.nl Hermie Hermens Roessingh Research and Development Biomedical Signals and Systems Group, University of Twente Enschede, the Netherlands Email: H.Hermens@rrd.nl Abstract—Nowadays it is recognized that physical activity, besides other lifestyles, has indisputable beneficial affects on cardiovascular diseases prevention and treatment. Additionally the social support is important and has a valuable impact on the outcomes in cardiovascular disease patients. To provide the patients the social support needed and, to support and motivate them in their daily physical activity, we are working on building a mobile virtual community for physical activity support connected to a triaxial accelerometer, where the physical activity will be monitored and the main objective will be to motivate and support the patients to be adequately physically active. In this paper, the main functionalities supported by the community are discussed and the instrumental support is also investigated and metrics, based on the IMA metric, are proposed. Index Terms—Cardiovascular Diseases, Heart Failure, Hyper- tension, Instrumental Support, Physical Activity, Social Support, Virtual Community. I. I NTRODUCTION Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are a significant cause of mortality and morbidity in the European Union, and result in considerable economic and social costs [1][2]. 80% of premature deaths could be avoided by controlling the main risk factors: smoking, unhealthy died and physical inactivity. Some health organizations (such as ESC[1] and AHA[3]) recommend CVD patients to adopt some lifestyle changes such as being physically active. Physical activity is any bodily movement produced by skeletal muscles, that results in energy expenditure[4]. In the literature [5], a linear relationship has been reported between the energy expenditure and body accel- eration due to the body movements. Physical activity in daily life can be categorized into occupational, sports, conditioning, household, or other activities[4]. AHA and ESC recommend CVD patients and older people in general to be physically active based on the gained benefits such as that the physical activity (PA) prevents, manages and reduces high blood pressure, provides a way to share an activ- ity with family and friends, boosts energy level, and maintains quality of life and independence longer. But, there are some common perceived barriers for older people [6] (CVD patients are mostly elderly people) for being physically active, such as lack of time and motivation, physical limitations, lack of knowledge and stereotyping (for example, the perception that older people and especially CVD patients do not have to exercise because of their health state). When patients are socially supported, they can comply more to the physical activity. A literature study[8] was conducted to get the impact of social support on the outcomes of HF patients, especially readmission, mortality, quality of life and depression. Authors affirm that the social support for patients with HF (could be extended to CVD patients in general) is a strong predictor of hospital readmissions and mortality. Patients with poor social support have a higher risk of mortality and hospital readmissions. There are various types of social support: emotional support, appraisal support, informational support, and instrumental support[7]. Currently, there are many ICT-mediated solutions such as the virtual healthcare communities that aim to provide patients the needed social support, especially emotional and informational support (see section II for more details). It is presumed that the virtual communities improve the patients’ motivation. In this direction, we are investigating in building physical activity mobile virtual community (MVC) for CVD patients with the use sensor technologies (accelerometer). Activity monitoring based on an accelerometer sensor is an useful method to obtain objective information about the daily physical activity patterns and the related energy expenditure [10][9][5]. The IMA metric proposed by Bouten[11] will be the basic metric supported. The MVC will provide mainly the instrumental and appraisal support. The challenge will be to couple the social support model, as a motivation theory, with another one wildly uses in health purposes: the Transtheoretical Model[12] to motivate patients to be adequately physically active. The action and maintenance stages Transtheoretical Model are the most challenging within the MVC. In this paper we are providing an overview about the functionalities of the MVC and instrumental support pro- vided within the community. Monitoring the patients’ physical activity, in term of energy expenditure, is the instrumental support core. For this aim we need some metrics, besides the IMA, which are presented here. The outline of the paper us as follows. Section 2 presents related works and section 3 presents an overview about our mobile virtual community. Then, in section 4 we present the instrumental support that will be provided within the community and in the last section we present a discussion and some conclusions. II. RELATED WORK The virtual healthcare communities are in perpetual evolu- tion/increasing to help either patients or healthy subjects to be