I wonder if recommender systems can be useful in health, could it be helpful to enhance health related search? or can we use it to create a personalized fitness program or diet? Is there any work done in this field?
Ahmad, RS is a new area to me, but I found this useful article that may answer some of your queries, please check it out; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3968965/.
The terminology in health informatics is different, but there are people working on related things. I would suggest Pubmed searches using the keyword "behavioral intervention".
There are various personalized fitness and health trackers in existence now. There are even employee health plans that utilize them, for example to encourage their members to get more exercise or quit smoking; and I've heard of mental health apps too. And there are many personalized diet programs that have a smartphone application.
They can theoretically be used for health research, for example to evaluate the effectiveness of health messages or to assess how many minutes per week people actually exercise, the times of day, routes taken for running, sex and age differences, etc.. But some problems are that the information gathered is self-reported, and it may be difficult to get meaningful results without large numbers of participants. But they have the potential to be useful. I don't remember the source, but I read somewhere that personalized health apps that pair the participant with a buddy or an on-line counselor are effective. Part of their effectiveness is probably that they serve as reminders, partly social pressure, and partly from tracking the participants' progress towards achieving health goals and giving feedback.
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