Adaptive health coaching technology for tailored interventions

Abstract

Recent advances in sensor and communications technology have enabled scalable methods for providing continuity of care to the home for patients with chronic conditions and older adults wanting to age in place. In this article we describe our framework for a health coaching platform with a dynamic user model that enables tailored health coaching messages. We have shown that this can improve coach efficiency without a loss of message quality. We also discovered many lessons for coaching technology, most demonstrating the need for more coach input on sample message content, perhaps even requiring that individual coaches be able to modify the message data-base directly. Overall, coaches felt that the structure of the automated message generation was useful in remembering what to say, easy to edit if necessary and especially helpful for training new health coaches.