Do CHANGE was a research & innovation project with European and Taiwanese partners, co-funded by the European Commission and the Taiwanese Government. The primary objective of Do CHANGE was to develop a health ecosystem which changes lifestyle or behavioral risk factors for coronary heart disease, chronic heart failure and hypertensive patients.
As a behavior change technique, Do Something Different (DSD) has been applied, which focuses on getting people to actually change small behaviors by delivering change prompts through small positive actions called Do's. The aim of all Do's is to override a person’s inbuilt impulse to act habitually; to help them break free from the gravitational pull of habits as they go about their day and to remind them of the micro-behaviors they need if they are to live more healthily.
COOKiT is one of the new hardware concepts. The product consists of: a physical intelligent spatula, a physical charging station, an online back end server and a smartphone application. The spatula measures cooking habits such as the amount of sodium used, the amount of time spent cooking and general cooking patterns. FLUiT helps people adopt healthy drinking habits. It is a sensor band that fits around drinking bottles, mugs and glasses. FLUiT includes two sensors: one quantifies liquid intake and one interprets drinking actions. Algorithms identify drinking habits and provide actionable and contextual Do’s to break them. Horus is an image pattern recognition software application that allows users to identify the ingredient nutrition and composition of the specified food items. The service can capture the composition of an entire meal in one photo and segment different target areas in that photo. Each target area could be identified to different specified food items from the back end server, which is established with food database training models.
A new ICT architecture consisting of distributed systems has been defined, with the high-level interfaces between them being specified and developed. The architecture will support the coordination of identity and privacy preferences between the distributed systems, such that information associated with an individual that is distributed between these systems can be shared in accordance with their preferences. The architecture will also support the sharing of pseudonymised information for individual analysis and “big data” analytics. A data analytics framework has been set-up, which will be incorporated within the Do CHANGE architecture, processing collated data from the pseudonymised database with the aim of optimising the health outcomes of patients.
Two RCT clinical trials (200 interventions, 200 serving as control group) were applied to demonstrate the total proof of concept: with a series of fine-tuned responsive Do’s, based on modern wearables it is possible to substantially and sustainably change the behaviour of patients that are at risk for worsening health if they do not change their habits.
Do CHANGE cost-effectiveness and exploitation studies suggest some novel commercially exploitable aspects not previously considered. They suggests different objectives and outcomes for the different client groups outlined. It also suggests that some of the main barriers to successful exploitation are inherent to the healthcare business sector.
