Supporting Self-Management of Health Care Through the Use of Health Coaching and Mhealth

Abstract

Health coaching is an intervention process for driving behavior change through goal-setting, education, encouragement and feedback on health-related behaviors. Mobile health (mHealth) is the use of mobile technology to facilitate data collection and enable self-management of one’s health. Health coaching is traditionally conducted by a human health coach through periodic interaction with a patient; however, digital coaching is increasingly being used for the management of chronic diseases and mental health care. The literature review for this dissertation identified a significant gap in that most health coaching efforts used a human coach as part of the mHealth intervention. Thus, a significant gap exists in the application of automated digital health coaching as an intervention method for the self-management of one’s health. To address this gap, three projects at different levels of mHealth and digital coaching application were selected to obtain a holistic perspective and explore the integration of mHealth and digital health coaching to support self-management of one’s health care. The first project, biofeedback for stress self-management, provided health coaching for stress management utilizing an mHealth app that coached the participant through the proper breathing technique while providing real-time visual feedback of heart rate. The second project, hypertension self-management, provided health coaching on hypertension management utilizing an mHealth app that enabled automatic data collection of blood pressure and weight measurements and provided coaching information in the form of feedback of daily measurements, educational information, quizzes, assessments and progress reports. The third project, mental health self-management, provided health coaching on mental health care utilizing an mHealth app that provided interactive mental health management tools and digital health coaching educational information on anxiety, sleep, depression, stress and grief/relationship issues as well as weekly measurements of self-reported anxiety, perceived stress and depression with immediate feedback of self-reported measures. This research demonstrated that digital health coaching combined with mHealth technology can be used effectively for the self-management of chronic diseases such as hypertension and to deliver health coaching for the self-management of mental health. As part of this research, guidelines for designing mHealth coaching systems to support the self-management of one’s health care were developed.