Just-in-Time but Not Too Much: Determining Treatment Timing in Mobile Health

There is a growing scientific interest in the use and development of just-in-time adaptive interventions in mobile health. These mobile interventions typically involve treatments, such as reminders, activity suggestions and motivational messages, delivered via notifications on a smartphone or a wearable to help users make healthy decisions in the moment. To be effective in influencing health, the combination of the right treatment and right delivery time is likely critical. A variety of prediction/detection algorithms have been developed with the goal of pinpointing the best delivery times. The best delivery times might be times of greatest risk and/or times at which the user might be most receptive to the treatment notifications. In addition, to avoid over burdening users, there is often a constraint on the number of treatments that should be provided per time interval (e.g., day or week). Yet there may be many more times at which the user is predicted or detected to be at risk and/or receptive. The goal then is to spread treatment uniformly across all of these times. In this paper, we introduce a method that spreads the treatment uniformly across the delivery times. This method can also be used to provide data for learning whether the treatments are effective at the delivery times. This work is motivated by our work on two mobile health studies, a smoking cessation study and a physical activity study.