"Health in Mobile" for Community-dwelling Individuals With Chronic Diseases

Motivational interviewing (MI) is a clinical technique used to enhance an individual's behavioral changes. The MI intervention shares a similar basis as the cognitive behavioral therapy based on the Stages of Change. It has been found effective for enabling individuals to tackle their problems in weight control, substance abuse, and smoking. The proposed study focuses on facilitating individuals with chronic diseases such as high blood pressure and diabetes to adopt health behaviors. The technique employed to facilitate the behavioral changes is the MI. Previous literature has reported the positive effects of MI in patients with chronic diseases. For instance, promoting weight loss in overweight and obese individuals, improving physical activity self-management in adults with type II diabetes, and regulation in blood pressure level among hypertensive individuals. However, the applications of the MI are mostly via the face-to-face method. Other application methods such as telephone coaching, online synchronous chat and mobile app are delivered as the alternative for communication. Individuals are engaged to enhance or modify certain behaviors via such as instant text interaction with psychologists, messages generated from a predefined system, and messages from interactive tools based on one's situation. Positive intervention effects were observed in these alternative forms of MI in terms of successful weight loss from a mobile app and telephone coaching and smoking cessation from telephone coaching. However, drawbacks include decreased attendance and engagement for lengthy programs, technical issues in delivering messages, and over-simplification of materials. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to deliver the MI to the participants with the use of perceptual learning theories, and the differential focuses on the cognitive and affective components when viewing simple MI messages via an app, and we name it the e-MI.