Previously submitted to: JMIR mHealth and uHealth (no longer under consideration since Jan 13, 2026)
Date Submitted: Jun 8, 2025
Open Peer Review Period: Jun 16, 2025 - Aug 11, 2025
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
NOTE: This is an unreviewed Preprint
Warning: This is a unreviewed preprint (What is a preprint?). Readers are warned that the document has not been peer-reviewed by expert/patient reviewers or an academic editor, may contain misleading claims, and is likely to undergo changes before final publication, if accepted, or may have been rejected/withdrawn (a note "no longer under consideration" will appear above).
Peer review me: Readers with interest and expertise are encouraged to sign up as peer-reviewer, if the paper is within an open peer-review period (in this case, a "Peer Review Me" button to sign up as reviewer is displayed above). All preprints currently open for review are listed here. Outside of the formal open peer-review period we encourage you to tweet about the preprint.
Citation: Please cite this preprint only for review purposes or for grant applications and CVs (if you are the author).
Final version: If our system detects a final peer-reviewed "version of record" (VoR) published in any journal, a link to that VoR will appear below. Readers are then encourage to cite the VoR instead of this preprint.
Settings: If you are the author, you can login and change the preprint display settings, but the preprint URL/DOI is supposed to be stable and citable, so it should not be removed once posted.
Submit: To post your own preprint, simply submit to any JMIR journal, and choose the appropriate settings to expose your submitted version as preprint.
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Precision Behavioural Support in Weight Management: A Real-World Evaluation of a Novel Precision Health Behavioural Change Architecture for Initiating and Maintaining Sustainable Health-Promoting Behaviours in People with Obesity
ABSTRACT
Background:
Over 1.9 billion people are classified as being obese or overweight. Digital technologies have varying effects in affecting weight loss in participants. Precision health exploits the benefits of digital health and data by being able to provide highly tailored, or personalised, pathways to service users. Obesity is a multi-morbid condition caused in part by lifestyle risk factors including dietary choices, sleep hygiene, exercise and mental health.
Objective:
The objective was to assess the effect of participants choosing their health “focus” on joining the NHS-certified Gro Health app to support holistic remote weight management.
Methods:
Participants were invited to engage with a precision behavioural change tool that addresses the four pillars of health-mental health/wellbeing, nutrition, sleep and exercise-via the Gro Health app. Participants were referred by primary care teams or local authorities and invited to use the tool’s education programmes, access multidisciplinary team (MDT) health coaching and track their health. Gro Health onboards users to self-select a “Focus” on either: Sleep, Exercise, Nutrition, or Wellbeing. Outcome variables-weight (kg), HbA1c (%), PHQ-8 (depression), Karolinska Sleepiness Scale (KSS) and Patient Activation Measure (PAM)-were compared across “focus” groups.
Results:
A total of 438 participants (mean age: 41.9 ± 13 years; mean starting weight: 95.59 kg ± 5.6) downloaded the app. 72% selected nutrition as their focus. The greatest average weight loss of 7.0 kg was observed in this group. Improvements in sleepiness and depression were highest among those selecting sleep as their focus.
Conclusions:
User-driven focus selection influences health outcomes. Precision behavioural change tools like Gro Health can support sustainable, tailored health improvements across multiple domains and represent a scalable method for delivering personalised weight management.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.