Browsing by Author "Hekler, Eric B."

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    Behavior change interventions: the potential of ontologies for advancing science and practice
    (Springer Nature, 2017-02) Larsen, Kai R.; Michie, Susan; Hekler, Eric B.; Gibson, Bryan; Spruijt-Metz, Donna; Ahern, David; Cole-Lewis, Heather; Bartlett Ellis, Rebecca J.; Hesse, Bradford; Moser, Richard P.; Yi, Jean; School of Nursing
    A central goal of behavioral medicine is the creation of evidence-based interventions for promoting behavior change. Scientific knowledge about behavior change could be more effectively accumulated using "ontologies." In information science, an ontology is a systematic method for articulating a "controlled vocabulary" of agreed-upon terms and their inter-relationships. It involves three core elements: (1) a controlled vocabulary specifying and defining existing classes; (2) specification of the inter-relationships between classes; and (3) codification in a computer-readable format to enable knowledge generation, organization, reuse, integration, and analysis. This paper introduces ontologies, provides a review of current efforts to create ontologies related to behavior change interventions and suggests future work. This paper was written by behavioral medicine and information science experts and was developed in partnership between the Society of Behavioral Medicine's Technology Special Interest Group (SIG) and the Theories and Techniques of Behavior Change Interventions SIG. In recent years significant progress has been made in the foundational work needed to develop ontologies of behavior change. Ontologies of behavior change could facilitate a transformation of behavioral science from a field in which data from different experiments are siloed into one in which data across experiments could be compared and/or integrated. This could facilitate new approaches to hypothesis generation and knowledge discovery in behavioral science.
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    Lessons Learned: Beta-Testing the Digital Health Checklist for Researchers Prompts a Call to Action by Behavioral Scientists
    (JMIR, 2021-12-22) Bartlett Ellis, Rebecca; Wright, Julie; Soederberg Miller, Lisa; Jake-Schoffman, Danielle; Hekler, Eric B.; Goldstein, Carly M.; Arigo, Danielle; Nebeker, Camille; School of Nursing
    Digital technologies offer unique opportunities for health research. For example, Twitter posts can support public health surveillance to identify outbreaks (eg, influenza and COVID-19), and a wearable fitness tracker can provide real-time data collection to assess the effectiveness of a behavior change intervention. With these opportunities, it is necessary to consider the potential risks and benefits to research participants when using digital tools or strategies. Researchers need to be involved in the risk assessment process, as many tools in the marketplace (eg, wellness apps, fitness sensors) are underregulated. However, there is little guidance to assist researchers and institutional review boards in their evaluation of digital tools for research purposes. To address this gap, the Digital Health Checklist for Researchers (DHC-R) was developed as a decision support tool. A participatory research approach involving a group of behavioral scientists was used to inform DHC-R development. Scientists beta-tested the checklist by retrospectively evaluating the technologies they had chosen for use in their research. This paper describes the lessons learned because of their involvement in the beta-testing process and concludes with recommendations for how the DHC-R could be useful for a variety of digital health stakeholders. Recommendations focus on future research and policy development to support research ethics, including the development of best practices to advance safe and responsible digital health research.