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I recently wrote a blog post called, Why Weight Loss Mobile Apps Aren’t Really Changing the Game, the crux of which was that the behavioral strategies employed in popular apps are still very simple and narrow relative to strategies employed in evidence-based behavioral weight loss interventions. My objective was to call for more engagement of behavioral science in mHealth. As a clinical psychologist whose job it is to employ evidence-based behavioral strategies to help people lose weight, I look forward to seeing more sophisticated strategies employed in mobile apps for health behavior change. Although my behavioral science colleagues and I have the expertise in the behavioral strategies, few of us have the technology background to easily envision how some of these strategies could be delivered in a mobile app, not to mention have the skill set to do the technology development. In this post I want to express my excitement for the potential that could arise from behavioral science and technology expert collaborations. Such collaborations are not without challenges though. Here I describe 3 major challenges to academic and industry collaboration along with solutions for overcoming them.
CHALLENGE 1. Everyone Has A Theory on Behavior Change. Popular press books on behavior change and/or weight loss have been pumped out in recent years like New Jersey housewives pump out hairspray, sending into the public a cacophony of approaches to diet and behavior change. Author’s personal biases and no pressure to be factually accurate make it difficult to separate fact from fiction in terms of effective behavior change and/or weight loss strategies. Even news reports on research findings are confusing, with frequently contradicting headlines about the “best” diet.
SOLUTION
The major opportunity for mHealth is to use mobile technology to deliver evidence-based strategies in a way that has greater potential for impact and reach relative to traditional intervention modalities. The key phrase here is “evidence-based strategies.” This is where the behavioral scientist comes in. Interventions are what we do. We design and test interventions based on various theoretical models of behavior, and then employ them in patient populations. Our heads are buried in data and research papers half the day and so we have a pretty decent sense of the state-of-the-literature as a whole. For example, if you wanted to develop an app around managing depression, a quick way to learn the research is to find a behavioral expert in depression. They will rattle off more than you ever cared to know about the treatment of depression. I am aware some of this is happening, but I’m surprised to see how many developers have no true content experts on their teams. Combine a behavioral content expert with a technology expert and some fascinating applications of evidence-based practices are sure to emerge.
CHALLENGE 2. Few opportunities for interaction. Because academics and industry professionals work in different environments and move in different circles, we are rarely exposed to each other’s work or have opportunities to mingle.
SOLUTION
Unlike the tech community, academics are stuck in the Dark Ages and therefore are not very present in social media. We make an art out of keeping ourselves (and our work) in obscurity! If you want to find expertise in a specific content area, find out who is publishing in that area using PubMed or Google Scholar. One way to narrow the search is to use the term “randomized clinical trial” to hone in on people at the forefront of intervention design. Alternatively, you can search for who has NIH grant funding on a topic by going to NIH REPORTER and doing a search by topic.
Behavioral scientists also do not typically show up to cool networking events like meet-ups and tweet-ups because of that obscurity problem I mentioned before. (We’re getting better, I promise). A great conference for the mother lode of behavioral scientists with expertise in health (e.g., obesity, cancer, smoking, exercise, diabetes) is the Society of Behavioral Medicine (SBM) Annual Meeting. In 2013, the meeting is in San Francisco, and theme is Technology: The Excitement and the Evidence. (See, told you we are getting better!). For behavioral scientists with expertise in mental illness, I recommend the Association for the Advancement of Cognitive and Behavior Therapies annual conference which is in November 2012 in National Harbor, Maryland. On the other hand, if you are a behavioral scientist looking for technology colleagues, the Behavioral Informatics SIG of SBM wrote a great blog post summarizing great health technology conferences.
CHALLENGE 3. Different incentives. Behavioral scientists work in academic settings which have very different incentives than industry, which can make collaboration difficult. We earn money via grants, teaching, and patient care, which makes spending time on side projects that do not generate revenue difficult. Making matters worse, the pace of federal grant funding is far slower than industry works. A single grant cycle—from start to funding, takes 9 months, and most grants require 2 cycles to get funded. The technology field is advancing too quickly for that to be feasible or informative.
SOLUTION
Put us to work! Behavioral scientists can be contracted via technology companies directly (circumventing the need for federal grants) to train, consult, and/or conduct research. To the extent that companies have funds for smaller scale studies, behavioral scientists have access to patient populations, staffing, and infrastructure to do this research in a sound manor, not to mention get it published. Funding would certainly help our labs stay afloat and the data produced by small studies is invaluable to us because we need pilot data to make our grant applications more competitive. Sound expensive? You might be surprised at how inexpensively this can be done. Usability studies, focus groups, and pilot trials can be done economically and expediently in an academic lab, depending on the size of the study.
I would love to hear other challenges and/or solutions you have come across! I’m very much looking forward to seeing collaborations bloom---there are already many great examples of this happening.
Looking for a behavioral scientist with expertise in obesity, diabetes, diet, exercise, stress and/or depression? Well, you just found one.
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Please also visit me at my main blog home, www.FUdiet.com.
