Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Mar 12, 2025
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 14, 2025 - May 9, 2025
Date Accepted: Sep 23, 2025
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Tailored goals and individual choice: A field experiment on automated commitment devices for health behavior
ABSTRACT
The incidence of chronic diseases associated with physical inactivity is on the rise. To address this public health issue we developed a mobile app that utilizes contextual multi-armed bandits, a type of reinforcement learning algorithm, to develop personalized workout plans, adjusting task difficulty. To test the role of tailoring and choice, we develop an adaptive intervention to measure the effectiveness of personalized goal recommendation (varying task difficulty) based on online reinforcement learning. Participants are divided into three groups: user choice (no recommendation), user choice with automated recommendations (contextual bandits), and automated plans without choice (contextual bandit optimal action). The main objectives are (1) to determine the effectiveness of contextual bandits for automated goal setting, (2) to understand the role of user characteristics impacting ideal workout schedules, and (3) to explore the influence of user autonomy on recommendation effectiveness. This research will contribute to the understanding of user choice versus data-driven recommendations in mobile health interventions, potentially informing the development of more effective behavior-change apps.
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© 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.