JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

To maintain the benefits of a bariatric procedure, patients have to change their lifestyle permanently. This happens within a context of co-responsibilities of health care professionals and their social support system. However, most interventions are focused on the patient as an individual. In this explorative pilot study, behavioral, contextual and experiential data were gathered to get insight in co-responsibility.

Objective:

Exploration in use of trackers by postbariatric patients in a data-enabled design approach.

Methods:

Behavior and contextual data of households of bariatric patients were explored using a smartphone with an interactive user interface, weight scale, activity bracelet, smart socket, accelerometer motion sensor and event button to find examples of opportunities for future interventions.

Results:

Six households were monitored. In total, 483,000 data points were collected, and the participants engaged in 1483 conversations with the system. Examples were found using different combinations of data types which provided the obesity team a better understanding of behavior of patients and their support system, like a referral to a family coach instead of a dietician. Furthermore, other findings for the partner were, for example, that the conversational user interface system facilitated the discussion about the support structure by asking for awareness.

Conclusions:

An intelligent system, using a combination of quantitative data gathered by data-tracking products in the home environment and qualitative data gathered by app-enhanced short conversations, and face-to-face interviews are useful for improved understanding of co-responsibilities in the households of bariatric patients. The examples found in this explorative study so far encourage research in this field.