Digital Health for All

This research theme is to leverage behavioral sciences and data sciences to establish novel generalizable user models of information behavior to support the development of personalized digital health innovation for promoting health behavior (such as self-management or behavior change) in the naturalistic environment.

Projects

Current Projects

  • Developing motivational interviewing conversational agents to support health behavior change and depression regulation

    • The research program aims at leveraging motivational interviewing (MI), natural language processing (including large language models), and health promotion theories to design, implement, and deploy the conversational agents to perform MI to encourage the adoption of health behavior.
      • Bak, M. & Chin, J. (2024). The potential and limitations of large language models in identification of the states of motivations for facilitating health behavior change. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 31(9), 2047-2053. https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocae057
      • Chin, J., Bak, M., Campbell, J., Sridharan, V., Imam, M., Bhat, S. & Chiu, C-Y (2024, October). Examining the Acceptance and Efficacy of Motivational Interviewing Chatbots (MintBot) on Changes in Health Behavior Intentions. Presentation at the 11th Year Anniversary Health Care Engineering Systems Symposium, Peoria, IL.
      • Chin, J., Bak, M., Campbell, J., Sridharan, V., Lai, S., Imam, M., Bhat, S. & Chiu, C-Y (2023, Oct). Examining the Acceptance of Motivational Interviewing Chatbots (MintBot): A Pilot Study. Presentation at the 10th Year Anniversary Health Care Engineering Systems Symposium, Urbana, IL.

  • Building e-Lifestyle coaches to augment self-regulated health promotion with evolving needs 

    • The research program aims at bridging Health Promotion Models (such as Health Action Process Approach), information behavior, language models, and machine learning to model and react to the evolving needs of longitudinal self-management for designing just-in-time adaptive interventions for people with chronic or progressive illness, including people with multiple sclerosis.

Ongoing and Completed Funding

  • National Institute of Health (National Library of Medicine)
  • National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR)
  • National Multiple Sclerosis Society
  • Jump ARCHES
  • Campus Research Board
  • Cancer Center at Illinois

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