Personalizing Financial Incentives

The purpose of this study is to determine the feasibility of providing personalized incentives for dietary self-monitoring and/or interim weight loss to people enrolled in a weight-loss program

In this study, community outpatients will participate in a clinician-facilitated, group-based behavioral weight-loss program for 24 weeks. Dietary self-monitoring data (input by patients via a mobile phone dietary application) and weight data (input by patients via cellular scale) will be collected by a software platform. A reinforcement learning algorithm will use data collected during the trial to predict which participants will respond to a financial incentive. Incentives will be provided to participants predicted to respond, and they will be notified of incentives via text messaging.