ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Digit. Health
Sec. Health Informatics
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fdgth.2025.1600535
Participatory Design and Evaluation of Digital Coaching for Improving Health -the Star Multicomponent Lifestyle Intervention
Provisionally accepted
- Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden
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Introduction: There are particular challenges when designing and developing a digital coaching application aimed to provide person-tailored support for lifestyle changes in multiple domains to promote health. This study explored how a participatory design process addresses challenges, materialized in a multi-component lifestyle intervention, understand onboarding experiences and early user engagement.Method: A participatory design methodology was applied involving a multidisciplinary team of 12 domain experts and different groups of end users in design cycles, model construction, prototyping and evaluation. The process followed a design methodology for argument-based health information systems, and a framework for layered interactive adaptive systems to engage domain experts in development of aspects relating to interactivity of the system. A qualitative user study was conducted with eight participants, five regular users and three nurses, focusing on the onboarding phase.Results: Contributions of this article are i) the StarCoach, the person-tailored health-promotion intervention for multiple health behaviours supporting short and long-term goals, ii) a framework for studying multicomponent lifestyle interventions with multiple behaviour change techniques (BCT), and iii) qualitative results regarding usage, adherence to and perceived effects of the intervention with a focus on the initial phase of using the app. The five regular participants reported increased health-promoting activities during the onboarding phase and were using already habituated activities to establish a routine to use the intervention.The participatory design led to StarCoach embedding clusters of BCTs, which build a framework for research on multicomponent lifestyle interventions. Whether using already habituated activities to establish a routine to use the intervention could be a strategy to increase adherence and engagement in the onboarding phase and beyond, will be a focus in future studies.The participants also showed increased engagement in their chosen lifestyle change activities during the study period. The findings will be followed up in future studies to evaluate effects on behaviour over a longer period of time.
Keywords: Behaviour Change, Human-AI interaction, Participatory Design, Computational argumentation, cardiovascular disease, Behaviour change techniques, personalisation, mHealth
Received: 26 Mar 2025; Accepted: 24 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Lindgren and Kilic. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Helena Lindgren, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.