Personal MobileCoach: Tailoring Behavioral Interventions to the Needs of Individual Participants

MobileCoach, an open source behavioral intervention platform, has been developed to provide health professionals with an authoring tool to design evidence-based, scalable and low-cost digital health interventions (DHI). Its potential meets the lack in resources and capacity of health care systems to provide DHI for the treatment of noncommunicable diseases. In the current work, we introduce the first personalization approach for MobileCoach with the purpose of identifying the needs of participants, tailoring the treatment and, as a consequence, enhancing the capability of MobileCoach-based DHIs. The personalization approach is then exemplified by a very first prototype of a DHI for people with asthma that is able to detect coughing by just using a smartphone’s microphone. First empirical results with five healthy subjects and 80 coughs indicate its technical feasibility as the detection accuracy yielded 83.3%. Future work will focus on the integration of personalized sensing and supporting applications for MobileCoach.