Cognitive Design

In the July 27th issue of Circulation, the American Heart Association made a 37 page scientific statement on interventions that produce enough activity and dietary changes in adults to lower their cardiovascular risk. One in three people in the US have cardiovascular disease and it is still our leading cause of death.

They looked at the results of 74 individual studies and essentially found that it requires a combination of cognitive strategies to produce lasting health-related behavior change including, counseling, goal setting, extended follow-up and self monitoring. Personalized strategies that use data and context relevant to the individual patient work best.

None of this will be a surprise to cognitive designers but it is good to have the force of a meta-study behind your approach. Plus they looked at the evidence for using specific techniques (e.g. motivational interviewing) and specific platforms (e.g. web. I am still working through the details on specific interventions and will share designable insights in later posts.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 27th, 2010 at 1:12 pm and is filed under Behavior Change, Examples, Service Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.