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VRE University of Southampton

Lifeguideonline: internet-based behavioural interventions

Publication date: September 2013

 

Summary

 

Behavioural scientists wanted to collaborate over the development of internet-based interventions aimed at helping people change their behaviour, for example by giving up smoking or losing weight. This Jisc-funded project built a web-based Virtual Research Environment (VRE), Lifeguideonline, where behavioural scientists can share interventions and collaborate to assess their effectiveness and improve their design.  Three years later, more than 1,000 behavioural scientists use Lifeguideonline worldwide to develop and deploy interventions. Ongoing maintenance and further development is now supported by several major EU and UK research projects which are using the VRE to design and deploy interventions addressing a wide range of behavioural issues.

 

What the project facilitated

 

An online environment that is used by more than 1,000 behavioural scientists worldwide to design and deploy online interventions and assess their effectiveness.

 

Important lessons for VRE developers

 

Identify an advocate to help you build your user base.

 

Design your VRE iteratively, testing your software with users at each stage of development.

 

Code and platforms evolve rapidly. Identify design principles and frameworks that will prove useful even when technology changes.

 

The challenge

 

The internet can provide a convenient way of delivering advice and support to people who want to change their behaviour, for example by giving up smoking, or taking up helpful behaviours such as those that reduce energy use. Although internet-based behavioural interventions are cheaper to deliver than traditional face-to-face meetings, their design can be costly, requiring considerable input from computer programmers as well as from behavioural scientists. 

 

To streamline the design process, computer scientists at the University of Southampton had previously developed a set of tools, called Lifeguide, which enable behavioural researchers to build interventions from standard components, removing the need for each intervention to be programmed individually. However, the researchers wanted to speed up the design process further by sharing interventions so that others could collaborate over their development and re-use them either completely or in part, so eliminating duplication of effort. Jisc funded a project to build a VRE to meet these requirements.

 

The innovative approach

 

The project, Internet-based behavioural research environment (IBBRE), built a web environment, called Lifeguideonline, that enables:

 

  • the deployment of Lifeguide tools for building interventions
  • the grouping of similar interventions so they can be found easily by behavioural scientists for comment  and re-use
  • the running of interventions directly from the environment so that a client's progress can be saved and monitored by the behavioural scientist who can respond in confidence when necessary
  • anonymisation of clients' interactions with interventions so that other researchers can collaborate over analysing data and assessing the effectiveness of interventions

 

Two previous Jisc-funded VRE projects influenced the design of Lifeguideonline, especially in the use of communications tools to support intervention sharing, critical analysis and peer review. MyExperiment had built an environment for sharing and collaborating over research processes (workflows); and CORE (Collaborative Orthopaedic Research Environment) had built an environment to support orthopaedic surgeons through the design of an experiment, collection and analysis of data and dissemination of results. “We couldn't use the code from this earlier work because the technology had moved on so much in the short time since they were developed. But we could use what they had done as guides to help us solve the problems we were now tackling,” says Dr Gary Wills, project director at the University of Southampton.

 

Throughout the project, developers worked closely with behavioural researchers, initially also at Southampton, holding weekly meetings to make sure that the VRE's design was meeting users' requirements. Professor Lucy Yardley led the user group and has been a strong advocate for Lifeguideonline.  “The VRE's strength was the community of users. Lucy worked hard to get the user group together,” says Wills.

 

The results

Three years since its launch, more than 1,000 behavioural scientists worldwide are registered users of Lifeguideonline which hosts dozens of behavioural interventions. Tens of thousands of people have used interventions that have been developed and deployed on the site. Some of the most notable include:

 

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2813%2960994-0/abstract

 

“It would be very difficult to develop interventions without Lifeguide and the VRE,” says Yardley.

 

Sustainability

 

Lifeguideonline is hosted on a server at Southampton, although major interventions have been run on servers elsewhere to cope with the large amount of data generated. Ongoing maintenance and improvement is being funded as part of several major projects to develop and evaluate numerous web-based healthcare interventions at Southampton. The university has been awarded £15 million in grants from UK research councils, the National Institute for Health Research, medical charities and the European Commission to develop interventions to support weight management, reduction of infection transmission and antibiotic over-use as well as the self-management of numerous long-term health conditions. “We're keeping the core team of programmers involved so we can constantly improve,” says Yardley.

 

Further information

 

The Jisc IBBRE project

 

Lifeguide VRE