ChangeGradients: Promoting Adolescent Health Behavior Change

STUDY AIMS: I. Design, develop, and iteratively refine a policy-based reinforcement learning behavior change system for preventive adolescent health (Part 1). II. Investigate the impact of a clinically integrated sample-efficient policy gradient-based behavior change system on adolescent behavior (Part 2). The project will culminate with an investigation of the behavioral effects of the CHANGEGRADIENTS system using adolescent patients recruited from two outpatient primary care clinics within the UCSF Department of Pediatrics: Mt. Zion Pediatrics and the Adolescent/Young Adult Clinic. It is hypothesized that adolescents who interact with CHANGEGRADIENTS will reduce number of days of alcohol use, reduce binge drinking, and increase self-efficacy to engage in healthy behavior and avoid risky substance use. It is anticipated that CHANGEGRADIENTS will provide a testbed for a broad range of health behavior change research and serve as the foundation for next generation personalized preventive healthcare through computationally enabled behavior change that is designed to be tightly integrated into clinical practice workflow. By taking advantage of the high degree of adaptive interactivity offered by its personalized behavior change environment, CHANGEGRADIENTS holds significant potential for creating compelling interactions that promote self-efficacy and engagement in healthy lifestyle behaviors to prevent cancer through improving cancer-related behaviors and risk factors. PART 1 of the study (Focus Group) has closed to enrollment. PART 2 of the study (Randomized Clinical Trial) is planned for enrollment upon finalization of data collected in Part 1.