Evaluating Consumer m-Health Services for Promoting Healthy Eating: A Randomized Field Experiment

Abstract

Mobile apps have great potential to deliver promising interventions to engage consumers and change their health-related behaviors, such as healthy eating. Currently, the interventions for promoting healthy eating are either too onerous to keep consumers engaged or too restrictive to keep consumers connected with healthcare professionals. In addition, while social media allows individuals to receive information from many sources, it is unclear how peer support interacts with professional support in the context of such interventions. This study proposes and evaluates three mobile-enabled interventions to address these challenges. We examine their effects on user engagement and food choices via a 4-month randomized field experiment. Mixed models provide strong evidence of the positive effect of image-based dietitian support and negative effects of peer support, and moderate evidence of the positive effects of mobile-based visual diary, highlighting the value of mobile apps for delivering advanced interventions to engage users and facilitate behavior change.

Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02206893.

Figures

Figure 1.

Screenshots of our smartphone application.

Figure 1.

Screenshots of our smartphone application.

Figure 2.

Dietitian support eliminated the negative association between FV and BMI, controlling for peer support, gender, race, age group, daily activity level, #months in study (p=.006 for the interaction term D*BMI).

Figure 3.

A plot of raw data shows that peer support facilitated disengagement (p=<.01 for the interaction term p>