The HEART project will investigate how to personalize mobile health coaching applications by involving the end user and tailoring the application to individual needs (i.e. putting the user at the HEART of the system). The scientific objectives of the HEART project are to analyze, process, protect, and facilitate personal health data, and integrate all data in an activity recognition platform. The most relevant research questions are (1) how to ensure the data analysis, while minimizing the amount of required data, (2) how to trade-off between local (in-network) data processing and in-cloud processing, (3) how to coherently protect the data and assure privacy, security and legal requirements, and (4) how to facilitate data gathering by mapping the needs and preferences of Chinese consumers to personal health wellbeing tools and technologies from Europe. In order to automatically recognize a person’s activities, the HEART project must gather and process sensitive personal data.