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MyBehavior: Persuasion by Adapting to User Behavior and User Preference

C

Cornell University

Status

Completed

Conditions

Weight Loss

Treatments

Device: Smartphone
Behavioral: MyBehavior
Behavioral: Generic suggestions

Study type

Interventional

Funder types

Other

Identifiers

NCT02359981
1302003617

Details and patient eligibility

About

MyBehavior is a mobile application with a suggestion engine that learns a user's physical activity and dietary behavior, and provides finely-tuned personalized suggestions. To our knowledge, MyBehavior is the first smartphone app to provide personalized health suggestions automatically, going beyond commonly used one-size-fits-all prescriptive approaches, or tailored interventions from health-care professionals. MyBehavior uses an online multi-armed bandit model to automatically generate context-sensitive and personalized activity/food suggestions by learning the user's actual behavior. The app continually adapts its suggestions by exploiting the most frequent healthy behaviors, while sometimes exploring non-frequent behaviors, in order to maximize the user's chance of reaching a health goal (e.g. weight loss).

Full description

A dramatic rise in self-tracking applications for smartphones has occurred recently. Rich user interfaces make manual logging of users' behavior easier and more pleasant; sensors make tracking effortless. To date, however, feedback technologies have been limited to providing counts or attractive visualization of tracked data. Human experts (health coaches) have needed to interpret the data and tailor make customized recommendations. No automated recommendation systems like Pandora, Netflix or personalized search for the web have been available to translate self-tracked data into actionable suggestions that promote healthier lifestyle without needing to involve a human interventionist.

MyBehavior aims to fill this gap. It takes a deeper look into physical activity and dietary intake data and reveal patterns of both healthy and unhealthy behavior that could be leveraged for personalized feedback. Based on common patterns from a user's life, suggestions are created that ask users to continue, change or avoid existing behaviors to achieve certain fitness goals. Such an approach is different from existing literature in two important aspects: (1) suggestions are contextualized to a user's life and are built on existing user behaviors. As a result, users can act on these suggestions easily, with minimal effort and interruption to daily routines; (2) unique suggestions are created for each individual. This personalized approach differs from traditional one-size-fits-all or targeted intervention models where identical suggestions are applied for groups of similar people or the entire population.

Enrollment

17 patients

Sex

All

Ages

18 to 60 years old

Volunteers

Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

  • In relatively healthy condition. Also, users must be interested in health and fitness.

Exclusion criteria

  • Individuals with physical disability and dietary problems are excluded.

Trial design

Primary purpose

Prevention

Allocation

Randomized

Interventional model

Parallel Assignment

Masking

Single Blind

17 participants in 2 patient groups

Generic suggestions
Active Comparator group
Description:
Control group participants received suggestions generated by the a nutritionist and exercise trainer. These suggestions didn't relate to user's life or their past behavior.
Treatment:
Device: Smartphone
Behavioral: Generic suggestions
MyBehavior
Experimental group
Description:
Experiment group participants received personalized suggestions from MyBehavior that relates their life and past behavior.
Treatment:
Device: Smartphone
Behavioral: MyBehavior

Trial contacts and locations

1

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Data sourced from clinicaltrials.gov

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