Master Assignment
Project: e-manager chronic diseases
Educational programme: BME (master), CS (bachelor and master)
Period: (TBD)
Student: (Unassigned)
Chair of the master assignment committee: Prof. dr. M.M.R. (Miriam) Vollenbroek- Hutten
If you are interested please contact :
Topics: technology supported coaching, data science, mHealth
Background information: Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) is one of the most common chronic conditions in the Netherlands. A healthy lifestyle has a positive effect on glucose regulation and can lower the risk of developing complications. However, it appears that people with T2DM have difficulty adopting a healthy lifestyle. Information and communication technologies (eHealth) have the potential to contribute to lifestyle changes in people with T2DM. The use of eHealth enables objective and continuous lifestyle monitoring and tailored digital lifestyle coaching. Within the E-Manager project, a coaching platform (the e-supporter) is being developed to offer personalized coaching to (among others) people with T2DM who want to improve their lifestyle with regard to physical activity or nutrition. The coaching currently consists of daily informative and motivational text messages to stimulate a healthy lifestyle. The e-supporter is developed through small iterative development and evaluation cycles in which the aim is to ultimately provide dynamic and tailored lifestyle coaching.
Problem: The next step in the development of the e-supporter is to use behaviour change theories and data science techniques to further tailor the coaching strategies to an individual. Behaviour change theories have been developed to explain health behaviours by taking into account determinants of behaviour, which are factors that contribute to the emergence or maintenance of certain behaviour [1],[2],[3]. These theories have been successfully used to guide behavioural change. In addition, the rise of the use of mobile and sensor technologies these days provide a harness of data which gives an opportunity to learn about peoples’ health behaviour, status and context. Since the aforementioned circumstances have an effect on people's lifestyle, this data can be used to offer lifestyle coaching as well.
In previous studies within the E-Manager project, behaviour change theories and mobile/sensor data have been used to develop tailored coaching strategies to support engagement in healthy lifestyle behaviours. However, these strategies are defined in decision rules in Microsoft Excel which are no longer suitable to enable further tailoring of lifestyle coaching. In order to be able to offer more tailored coaching content in the future, the goal is to develop an advanced decision support system.
Aim of the study: Developing a rule based decision support system based on behaviour change techniques and mobile and sensor data with the aim to offer tailored lifestyle coaching in people with T2DM.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK327617/
[2] https://www.forestresearch.gov.uk/documents/1409/behaviour_review_theory.pdf
[3] https://obssr.od.nih.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Social-and-Behavioral-Theories.pdf