ISR Insights Series: To treat and when to treat? (Walter Dempsey)

ISR Insights Series
To treat and when to treat? The role of sequential decision making and mobile technologies in health disorder research
Speaker: Walter Dempsey

The development of smartphone and wearable sensors has led to an unprecedented opportunity to leverage these technologies to facilitate healthy behavior change. Push notifications delivered at the right time may have a huge impact; however, too many notifications may irritate and even exacerbate the situation. A critical question we face is “How do we design treatment plans that leverage mobile technologies for individuals struggling with a variety of health disorders?” Today, Walter Dempsey will discuss these types of treatment designs, known as just-in-time adaptive interventions, which are protocolized by a sequence of decision rules that specify whether and how to intervene depending on the person’s changing needs. He will discuss recent work by the Data Science for Dynamic Intervention Decision-making Center (d3c) in experimental designs and associated data analytic tools to answer questions about adaptive interventions and directions of future research.

This webinar is part of a continuing series focusing on the research happening at the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.