Pre Conference Course 17: From Concept to App: Designing and Implementing Mobile Health, Wearable, and Just-in-Time Interventions in Behavioral Medicine

Mobile health (mHealth) platforms and wearable devices provide behavioral scientists with new tools to capture real-time physiological and behavioral data and deliver interventions when and where they are most needed. Data streams from smartphones and sensors (e.g., heart rate variability, activity, sleep, electrodermal activity) enable researchers to study health behaviors in context and to develop just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs) that respond dynamically to participants’ lived experiences. Despite this promise, designing and deploying mHealth studies raises important scientific considerations, including selecting appropriate devices, ensuring data validity and feasibility, managing analytic complexity, and protecting privacy. This pre-conference course will serve as a practical tutorial on how to integrate mobile health tools into behavioral medicine research. Instructors will begin by comparing wearable devices in terms of capabilities, validity, feasibility, and levels of research data access. They will then provide a step-by-step framework for designing mHealth studies, including ecological momentary assessment, biosignal integration, and specification of digital intervention triggers using no-code platforms. Attendees will work through examples to map a behavioral intervention idea onto a mobile health study design, with guided discussion of analytic approaches for high-frequency data. The course will conclude with a hands-on activity in which participants transform an exemplary behavioral intervention into an app-based digital format using a no-code platform, demonstrating how quickly and effectively these methods can be applied to ongoing or planned research.

Author - Amir Rahmani, PhD
University of California, Irvine

Co-Author - Mahyar Abbasian, PhD Candidate
University of California, Irvine