An 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

a) face-to-face, e.g. teacher, therapist, manager  expert, personalised  effective but resource intensive b) print format, e.g. leaflet  generic, no support  cheap but low impact

WBBIs are ubiquitous and cost-effective It 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

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.

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

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.

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

Desktop Authoring Tool ◦ Eclipse Rich Client Platform ◦ Embedded Mozilla Firefox ◦ JavaScript ◦ QTI XML ◦ XSLT ◦ Jetty Intervention Manager Web Portal ◦ Groovy/Java on Rails

 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

 LifeGuide  My Contact:  Project Manager: Dr. Gary Wills, Thank You !