ICT supported healthy lifestyle interventions: design lessons

Healthy living is increasingly urgent, since it may help curb our escalating health care costs. ICT (Information and Communication Technology) offers healthy lifestyle support opportunities. Given the dose-response relation between health behaviors and -benefits, an important challenge is: how to motivate participants to large health behavior improvements? We conducted two design and test iterations to add ICT support to traditional face to face coach formats: first web based eDashboarding. Next: integrating existing best of breed mobile smart phone apps (mApps) in the coach relationship. We extract several design lessons regarding: how to design for a motivational virtuous circle, and when do Web or mApps add benefits for users? An important finding is that eCoach solutions add more value when part of an overall health coach relationship. For the future, we anticipate more intelligent mobile applications for health behavior tracking and feedback, plus an increasing role for mApps in health provisioning.