The ground truth is out there: Challenges with using pervasive technologies for behavior change

The recent flood of wearable technology and mobile apps, focused on quantifying and providing feedback on consumers’ lifestyles, has the potential to impact immensely on health and wellbeing. Despite this, limited evidence is available as to how effective these technologies are in promoting sustained behavior change and how these technologies can be integrated into health care. As researchers seek to evaluate and substantiate that these technologies are efficacious and effective, many challenges are emerging which will impact on the future success of such technologies. This paper provides an overview of the research challenges in applying wearable and mobile technology for monitoring and implementing behavior change interventions with a specific focus on sustained engagement. The paper provides an insight as to how researchers in pervasive health are currently aiming to address these issues through a number of case studies. In particular, the paper discusses methods to improve data collection techniques to support context aware applications, behavior change models, and novel feedback and interaction methods to encourage sustained engagement.