App Helps Users Turn Good Intentions Into Good Habits

Healthy Habits, an app for the iPhone, helps users make good on good intentions. A winner of the U.S. Surgeon General’s Healthy Apps Challenge, the Healthy Habits app was developed by 2Morrow Mobile, a company that specializes in behavioral change technology.

Healthy Habits app

Tackling Heart Disease Together or Alone: The Behavioural Science of Self-Management

ResearchBlogging.org

Heart disease is the leading killer in the U.S. and throughout most of Europe. People’s behaviour can protect and reduce risk of heart disease, and interventions to help people “self-manage” exist. But what is the best way to “self-manage”? A recent study shows that group programmes and self-directed programmes have remarkably different effects [1].

heart-disease

Self-management interventions exist for many health problems. They are notoriously difficult to define. One thorough definition is that it relates to activities undertaken by the person who has a “chronic” or “long-term” condition such as asthma, multiple sclerosis or arthritis. These activities include problem solving, decision making, resource utilization, the formation of a patient-provider partnership, action planning and self tailoring [2]. Interventions or programmes are designed around these activities to help support people to manage their own illness. The idea is that following attendance at a programme of some sort, the activities and skills learned will be continued to be used, thus improving health, maintaining fitness and/or quality of life and reducing the risk of future acute episodes of ill health. These interventions are popular for many reasons, including the relatively low cost to health service providers as interventions can be delivered by health-care professionals or by people with the relevant condition who have been trained, or a mixture of both. Self-management interventions also allow people with long-term conditions to be meet in a group with people with similar conditions. The experience of being in a group, knowing one is not alone and sharing stories is thought to play some part in the effectiveness of self-management interventions. But to what extent is this true?