LifeGuideAn infrastructure for empowering behavioural intervention research

Yang Yang, Adrian Osmond, Xiaoyu Chen, Mark Weal, Gary Wills, David De Roure

Judith Joseph, Lucy Yardley

What is a Behavioural Intervention?◦ A package of advice and support for behaviour

change - are arguably the most important methodology and technology employed by social scientists for understanding and changing behaviour.

Some Example …◦ Smoking cessation◦ Prevention of spreading colds and flu◦ Avoid unprotected sexual intercourse◦ Eat a healthy diet

Behavioural Intervention

Delivering behavioural Interventiona) face-to-face, e.g.

teacher, therapist, manager

expert, personalised effective but resource

intensiveb) print format, e.g. leaflet generic, no support cheap but low impact

WBBIs are ubiquitous and cost-effectiveIt can: Provide accurate and persistent advice

Access large volumes of information

Provide adaptive interaction in various modalities to produce optimum persuasive impact.

Enable anonymity and reduce stigma

Web-based Behavioural Intervention (WBBI)

Research Difficulties Lack of software for authoring WBBIs

Commercial tools are inflexible for research

Often require the extra cost of hiring software engineers.

Need to develop WBBI applications and analyze the data of each intervention individually

Once deployed, cannot be easily modified

All these hinders researchers in developing and testing WBBIs.

Therefore limiting the accumulation of knowledge behavioural intervention research

LifeGuide - An infrastructure for empowering behavioural intervention research- co-designed by both computer scientists and behavioural

psychologists

Enabling social scientists with minimal technical expertise to develop a WBBI by themselves.

Interventions can be shared or reused within the community to devise evolving interventions.

LifeGuide

How to enable social scientists – with no graphic design experience to create

web pages

with no programming experience to program the adaptive parts of an intervention

How to provide a research environment which feels familiar to social scientists

Three Major Chanllenges

two major components: Desktop Authoring Tool

- for creating and editing intervention applications

Intervention Manager Web Portal - for recording and analysing the

data of the intervention participants.

LifeGuide Platform

Upload on the Intervention Manager Web Portal

Design Intervention in the Desktop Authoring Tool

records all participants’ data

Export data from web portal for further analysis

Authoring Tool Video Demo

Intervention Video DemoInternet Doctor

Data Analysis

Desktop Authoring Tool◦ Eclipse Rich Client Platform◦ Embedded Mozilla Firefox◦ JavaScript◦ QTI XML◦ XSLT◦ Jetty

Intervention Manager Web Portal ◦ Groovy/Java on Rails

Technique Details

We conducted workshop include a hands-on demo session in a number of institutions◦ Majority can complete an intervention with simple logic with no

help from computer programmer◦ We also observed a difficulty in creating intervention with complex

logic

Learning materials are currently underdevelopment

Graphical programming method is also under investigation.

Several Intervention research projects joined our network to use LifeGuide to develop their interventions

Current Development and Future Chanllenges

LifeGuide http://www.lifeguideonline.org/

My Contact: yy1402@ecs.soton.ac.uk

Project Manager: Dr. Gary Wills, gbw@ecs.soton.ac.uk

Thank You !