HEALS StepUp!

StepUp! App Description:
The StepUp! iPhone application was designed at RPI to facilitate a novel research project funded under the Health Empowerment by Analytics, Learning and Semantics (HEALS) initiative. This research proposes to use insights from psychology and behavioral economics to design and test the impact of personalized motivational and/or informational methods for increasing users’ physical activity. StepUp! also allows you to view your daily and 7-day average step counts.

How StepUp! works:
StepUp! connects to Apple’s HealthKit and other data sources on your iPhone to collect step counts, heart rate, activity, accelerometer, GPS location, and calendar data. RPI will analyze this data to learn about patterns in your physical activity behavior. StepUp! is designed as a research study app and not intended to be used to provide medical advice or treat a condition.

You can download StepUp! and participate in study if you:
• Are 18 years or older
• Will not travel to the EU while using StepUp!
• Have a wellness goal of increasing daily physical activity
• Have an iPhone with iOS 10 or above

Motivation:
Many of the leading causes of death in the United States can be most cost-effectively treated through interventions to mitigate the associated behavioral and lifestyle risk factors, such as physical inactivity and poor diet (Bauer et al., 2014; Sidney et al., 2016; Martin et al., 2017). Promoting healthier behaviors will also dramatically reduce national healthcare expenditures, where almost all (93%) of the $300 billion in total US healthcare spending for the Medicare population was in support of adults with preventable chronic diseases (CMS, 2012). Intelligent AI assistants, known as “Smart Apps,” promise the ability to engage and assist individuals in taking control of their own health by offering users personalized information and healthy recommendations pertaining to behaviors such as diet, physical activities, and time management.

Recent behavioral interventions have successfully used such personalized health tools to initiate healthier behaviors in a wide range of settings (Gill and Panda, 2015; McKenzie and Van Der Mars, 2015; Chen et al. 2016). These devices represent a low-cost, readily accessible mechanism for combating the growth in U.S healthcare expenditures as well as reducing the socioeconomic disparities in health outcomes. However, the behavioral change induced through these interventions rarely persists over time. Psychological theory and behavioral economics offers several new insights that can improve the efficacy of these tools for delivering sustained health benefits. This research proposes to experimentally test some of these theories through the individualized messages targeting increases in users’ physical activity that may be surfaced by the StepUp! app.

Study details:
StepUp! Principal Investigator: Chad Stecher, Department of Economics, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Rensselaer IRB # 1698