Integrating Taxonomies into Theory-Based Digital Health Interventions for Behavior Change: A Holistic Framework
This addresses the problem of fragmented reporting and review difficulties for digital health intervention developers and researchers, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing taxonomies and principles.
The authors tackled the inconsistency and lack of comprehensiveness in digital health interventions by proposing a holistic framework that integrates behavioral theories, behavior change technique taxonomy, and persuasive system design principles to guide developers in designing, evaluating, and reporting their work.
Digital health interventions have been emerging in the last decade. Due to their interdisciplinary nature, digital health interventions are guided and influenced by theories (e.g., behavioral theories, behavior change technologies, persuasive technology) from different research communities. However, digital health interventions are always coded using various taxonomies and reported in insufficient perspectives. The inconsistency and incomprehensiveness will bring difficulty for conducting systematic reviews and sharing contributions among communities. Based on existing related work, therefore, we propose a holistic framework that embeds behavioral theories, behavior change technique (BCT) taxonomy, and persuasive system design (PSD) principles. Including four development steps, two toolboxes, and one workflow, our framework aims to guide digital health intervention developers to design, evaluate, and report their work in a formative and comprehensive way.