Embracing mHealth technologies for health behaviour change

Abstract

Rationale and Aims: Mhealth (mobile health) is the practice of medicine, public health and allied healthcare or self-care supported by mobile devices (e.g. smartphones, tablet computers, wearable activity monitors). The use of smartphones has risen exponentially globally and shows no sign of abating. The development of these and other novel mobile technologies provide a unique opportunity for researchers in population health to track real-time, continuous, accurate and objective measures of health indices and related behaviour, as well as provide a powerful platform for delivering behavioural interventions and providing health relevant feedback to users. Mhealth interventions have the potential to overcome several barriers to behaviour change, as well as provide flexibility to participants to engage with the educational content of an intervention in any context or time that provides an opportunity. There is emerging evidence that well-designed Mhealth interventions can effectively change patient health-related behaviour, improve patient knowledge and support for active involvement in self-management and lifestyle change leading to better health outcomes. Mhealth research affords a real opportunity to study, understand, and positively affect human behaviour. Summary: This symposium outlines a series of studies that have synthesised behaviour change strategies delivered via these new technologies on a variety of health behaviours. The Walsh et al paper outlines how an everyday mobile app can successfully be manipulated using behaviour change strategies to increase physical activity in young adults. Naughton et al found positive effects for the use of a smoking cessation app to collect real-time context aware data. Carr et al. found that a smartphone app can successfully be used to increase intentions to improve fruit and vegetable intake in young people, and finally Morrissey et al looked at how mobile technologies can be used to deliver an intervention targeting cognitive and affective attitudes (and measure behaviour) towards physical exercise.