Digital Health Interventions

At the LBI-DHP, we constantly aim to innovate and remain flexible in exploring novel interaction concepts, as well as pathways towards fostering motivation and sustainable behavior change. Informed by our close stakeholder engagement work, we iteratively develop a range of digital health interventions that aim to implement clear core concepts that are easily graspable to any professional or end-user stakeholders, but can also serve for exploring research questions around motivation, behavior change, personalization, adaptive and learning digital health technologies, efficacy as health and wellbeing interventions, and more. Last but not least, the ideas we take into prototyping are also selected for their clear potential in scalability: i.e. while they have a clear and feasible-to-implement core, it is also immediately apparent how the core concept could be augmented to reach wider audiences and achieve meaningful real-world impact. To this end we employ an innovation pipeline from early conceptual prototyping, over functional prototyping, to proof-of-concept and feasibility studies. Concepts that prove truly valuable can also selectively be considered for moving into more ambitious studies at a later time. We are currently exploring the following digital health intervention concepts:

Shared Achievements

The Shared Achievements digital intervention concept focuses on the exploration of social dynamics and relatedness factors on motivation and the extent of physical activity. It purposefully highlights shared contributions of group members into pooled activity outcome achievements and their communication (e.g. visualization) to other team members. With this intervention, we aim to investigate open research questions around human-computer interaction, behavior change and also the impact on objectively quantifiable health outcomes that such intervention concepts can have. The concept explores the potential to bring teams together around activities that they perform asynchronously throughout their individual lives. The concept can be of interest to health and wellbeing efforts at the workplace, or to working with existing groups in prevention and rehabilitation. The project is being developed at the LBI in collaboration with Dr. Dmitry Alexandrovsky of the TZI Digital Media Lab at the University of Bremen.

Active Waiting

This digital intervention concept provides a quick-and-easy tool that can be used to fill waiting and/or break times with spontaneous bouts of physical activity. Whether it means replacing a smoking break with a much healthier alternative, or making the perceived waiting time for a bus to arrive pass much more swiftly, this application concept allows for the exploration of relevant research questions around making such an intervention appealing and easy to use in a wide range of contexts.

Active Audio Adventures

Playfulness and gamification have considerable potential to motivate physical activity. This has mostly been explored in local settings using exercise stations in practices or at home, which misses out on the potential of many outdoor activities. This project combines geolocation with concepts from augmented reality for audio-based experience and interaction with an application that leads participants through “active audio adventure trails” which require physical activity to complete and are accompanied by motivating storylines that can be rooted in historical facts or imaginative and fun fiction. The concept offers room for interesting explorations into community generated content and modular or procedural content generation for longer-term motivation, as well as tie-ins with geolocation based health and wellbeing information. This project is being developed with Redox Interactive (REDOX GmbH) as a local implementation partner.

A development update on AAA from 17th of July 2023: