JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Digital health interventions can be effective at changing behaviour, but achieving long-term adherence remains a challenge. One psychological barrier to health behaviour change is future discounting, or the tendency to prefer smaller, short-term rewards over larger, long-term rewards. Episodic Future Thinking (EFT) can disrupt future discounting and is a promising technique for improving health behaviour, but such interventions have not been co-designed to address end-user needs.

Objective:

This study aimed to co-design an app with end-users to deliver an EFT intervention aimed at promoting health behaviour change in those in the pre-risk phase for chronic conditions.

Methods:

Community members participated in up to two series of face-to-face co-design workshops. A prototype of the app was reviewed, and insights were gathered to understand i) the optimal characteristics of the app and ii) the concepts of future discounting and EFT. Themes were generated using inductive thematic analysis.

Results:

Participants were n=30 South Australian adults who were predominately affluent females (90%) aged 25-44 years (M= 36.37, SD = 5.65). Feedback generated from the first workshop series resulted in n=26 suggestions of which n=15 informed iterative app development. Higher-level principles were identified and categorised into five overarching themes: concept acceptance, triggers and barriers, personalisation, gamification, and user-friendly interface.

Conclusions:

This study used co-design methodology to develop an app-based EFT intervention. Ongoing engagement with end-users and key stakeholders (e.g., health care professionals) is needed to ensure that the app meets changing needs. Future work will aim to evaluate its effectiveness in a large-scale clinical trial.