Building health behavior models to guide the development of just-in-time adaptive interventions: A pragmatic framework

By Inbal Nahum-Shani, Eric B. Hekler, Donna Spruijt-Metz. Health Psychology, 2015

523 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Advances in wireless devices and mobile technology offer many opportunities for delivering just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs)--suites of interventions that adapt over time to an individual’s changing status and circumstances with the goal to address the individual’s need for support, whenever this need arises. A major challenge confronting behavioral scientists aiming to develop a JITAI concerns the selection and integration of existing empirical, theoretical and practical evidence into a scientific model that can inform the construction of a JITAI and help identify scientific gaps. The purpose of this paper is to establish a pragmatic framework that can be used to organize existing evidence into a useful model for JITAI construction. This framework involves clarifying the conceptual purpose of a JITAI, namely the provision of just-in-time support via adaptation, as well as describing the components of a JITAI and articulating a list of concrete questions to guide the establishment of a useful model for JITAI construction. The proposed framework includes an organizing scheme for translating the relatively static scientific models underlying many health behavior interventions into a more dynamic model that better incorporates the element of time. This framework will help to guide the next generation of empirical work to support the creation of effective JITAIs.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, General Health Professions, Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aa16cd7a68fac2b304e481f41de27745f61f0649