SBIR Phase I: Digital Health Coaching Using Context-sensitive Data

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project lies in helping people cultivate healthy lifestyles. Over the last few decades, an epidemic of lifestyle diseases has developed in the United States. Unhealthy lifestyles, such as inactivity, poor nutrition and sedentary behaviors are driving up the prevalence of chronic disease such as diabetes, obesity and heart disease. As of 2012, about 117 million people had one or more chronic health conditions. Although chronic diseases like obesity and diabetes are among the most common and costly of all diseases, simply adopting healthy lifestyles can prevent many of these chronic diseases. About 86% of all health care spending in 2010 was for chronic medical conditions. Preventive approaches can offset current healthcare costs. However, prevention is typically implemented as labor-intensive coaching or mobile health apps that lack sufficient personalization to be effective. The technology platform being developed in this project will combine the best of both mobile and in-person coaching for a fraction of the cost of in-person coaching. The proposed project will help people to cultivate lifestyle changes. For a lifestyle disease patient, it is very difficult to change lifelong habits to adopt a healthy lifestyle. Hence, compliance with the recommendations of a doctor or coach is a long standing problem. Several reminder and tracker apps attempt to help with compliance and adoption of healthy lifestyle. Unlike such solutions, our approach is unique in its ability to proactively intervene with highly targeted interventions at the right moment, which is when compliance is most likely. Such moments will be captured through the ability of the platform to incorporate context-sensitivity. The platform will understand the context of each patient and will enable the coach to deliver interventional messages at the right moment, thereby increasing the likelihood of compliance and assisting with formation of healthy habits. The platform also provides scalability without significant loss in personalization.