Abstract
Health tourism represents a promising niche still insufficiently exploited in Europe and Switzerland. Hiking has been a popular tourist activity for years and staying healthy is an important motivation for hiking. However, physical and psychological limitations in potential hikers often represent an unsurmountable barrier to complete a particular path. This mismatch between trail and user results in a poor visitor experience, affecting negatively both the user and the touristic destination. This paper presents SanTour, a novel concept in health tourism centered on the needs of visitors by considering their physical capacities and limits, as well as their expectations. SanTour exploits two main knowledge bases: one centered on the user, including a health profile, and another centered on the hiking trails. In a pilot phase, the concept has been prototyped and tested on a limited scale, with support from a tourist office in Switzerland. We plan to further develop this application that will provide an innovative service to hikers by cross-referencing their physical abilities and the characteristics of the hiking trails.
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Notes
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SanTour proof of concept: http://santour.ch.
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Suisse Rando (2014): https://www.wandern.ch/de/downloads.
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Fédération Française de la Randonnée Pédestre http://www.ffrandonnee.fr.
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SNUKR: http://snukr.ch.
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- 7.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Chloé Saas and Kinitic SA for thier support. Partially supported by the RCSO Project SanTour (64896) HES-SO Valais-Wallis.
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Calbimonte, JP. et al. (2018). SanTour: Towards Personalized Recommendation of Hiking Trails to Health Profiles. In: Pautasso, C., Sánchez-Figueroa, F., Systä, K., Murillo Rodríguez, J. (eds) Current Trends in Web Engineering. ICWE 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11153. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03056-8_23
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