Abstract
Wearable and portable digital devices can support self-monitoring for patients with chronic medical conditions, individuals seeking to reduce stress, and people seeking to modify health-related behaviors such as substance use or overeating. The resulting data may be used directly by a consumer, or shared with a clinician for treatment, a caregiver for assistance, or a health coach for support. The data can also be used by researchers to develop and evaluate just-in-time interventions that leverage mobile technology to help individuals manage their symptoms and behavior in real time and as needed. Such wearable systems have huge potential for promoting delivery of anywhere-anytime health care, improving public health, and enhancing the quality of life for many people. The Center for Technology and Behavioral Health at Dartmouth College, a P30 “Center of Excellence” supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health, conducted a workshop in February 2017 on innovations in emerging technology, user-centered design, and data analytics for behavioral health, with presentations by a diverse range of experts in the field. The workshop focused on wearable and mobile technologies being used in clinical and research contexts, with an emphasis on applications in mental health, addiction, and health behavior change. In this paper, we summarize the workshop panels on mobile sensing, user experience design, statistics and machine learning, and privacy and security, and conclude with suggested research directions for this important and emerging field of applying digital approaches to behavioral health. Workshop insights yielded four key directions for future research: (1) a need for behavioral health researchers to work iteratively with experts in emerging technology and data analytics, (2) a need for research into optimal user-interface design for behavioral health technologies, (3) a need for privacy-oriented design from the beginning of a novel technology, and (4) the need to develop new analytical methods that can scale to thousands of individuals and billions of data points.
Highlights
Digital technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to better understand and enhance behavioral health—individuals’ cognitive, emotional, and behavioral well-being
This paper summarizes the workshop panels on mobile sensing, user-experience design, statistics and machine learning, and privacy and security, and concludes with suggested research directions for this important and emerging field of applying digital approaches to behavioral health
Mobile technologies can collect a wide range of data about individuals, including types of data not traditionally considered to be protected health information or personally identifiable information, but which can extract insights about sensitive behaviors and even reidentify anonymous individuals
Summary
Digital technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to better understand and enhance behavioral health—individuals’ cognitive, emotional, and behavioral well-being. The rapidly evolving interdisciplinary field of behavioral health is making increased use of emerging technologies, novel methodologies, and data analytics in the development of effective and personalized digital therapeutic interventions. These technologies include mobile and wearable devices, and enable the delivery of personalized, “in the moment” interventions to empower patients and improve health. Sophisticated data analytics can be used to gain insights from mobile, sensor, and social data about individual and population health via advanced statistical methods, including machine learning and predictive modeling These digital technologies enable an entirely new offering of tools for collecting rich data about individuals’ behavior, health, and environment, provide personalized interventions and resources based on individuals’ needs and preferences, and enable dynamic. The three discussed how human factors in UI/UX design, especially work on privacy-preserving or enhancing technologies and the broader tenets of privacy by design, could be part of the solution to the privacy and security concerns with mobile devices, and which laws and regulations might need modification to align with the privacy and security affordances of mobile-health technologies
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