Defining Effective Engagement For Enhancing Cancer Patients' Well-being with Mobile Digital Behavior Change Interventions
This work addresses the need for better guidance on engagement metrics in DBCIs for cancer patients, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing projects and focuses on specific hypotheses.
The study tackled the problem of defining effective engagement with mobile digital behavior change interventions (DBCIs) for cancer patients to enhance their well-being, finding that clinician prescriptions significantly increase sustained engagement and that one weekly engagement is sufficient for well-being maintenance.
Digital Behavior Change Interventions (DBCIs) are supporting development of new health behaviors. Evaluating their effectiveness is crucial for their improvement and understanding of success factors. However, comprehensive guidance for developers, particularly in small-scale studies with ethical constraints, is limited. Building on the CAPABLE project, this study aims to define effective engagement with DBCIs for supporting cancer patients in enhancing their quality of life. We identify metrics for measuring engagement, explore the interest of both patients and clinicians in DBCIs, and propose hypotheses for assessing the impact of DBCIs in such contexts. Our findings suggest that clinician prescriptions significantly increase sustained engagement with mobile DBCIs. In addition, while one weekly engagement with a DBCI is sufficient to maintain well-being, transitioning from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation may require a higher level of engagement.