MARCH 1, 2024
Robert Jakob, MSc
PhD Candidate and Doctoral Researcher, ETH Zürich & Centre for Digital Health Interventions
Visiting Research Fellow, Statistical Reinforcement Learning Lab,
About the Presentation: Digital health interventions (DHIs) offer promising solutions to the rising global challenges of noncommunicable diseases by promoting behavior change, improving health outcomes, and reducing healthcare costs. However, high dropout rates are a critical concern with DHIs, with many users disengaging before desired health outcomes can be achieved. This underscores the necessity for strategies to mitigate user disengagement. In his presentation, Robert Jakob will share initial findings on the impact of two potential intervention strategies — monetary incentives and personal coaching — on app usage of a digital health intervention for young adults with type 1 Diabetes (SweetGoals) from a 2×2 factorial randomized trial. Furthermore, Robert will present insights from his research on factors influencing adherence to DHIs and the potential of machine learning models to predict dropouts.
About the Presenter: Robert Jakob is a PhD candidate and doctoral researcher at the Centre for Digital Health Interventions at ETH Zurich, focusing on the prediction and prevention of non-adherence to digital health interventions. In his pursuit of understanding non-adherence to DHIs, he has analyzed longitudinal data across various mobile health app domains, including Diet, Weight Loss, Substance Use, Blood Pressure, and Diabetes Management. His work also includes the development and assessment of machine learning models for the prediction of non-adherence and dropouts. He has conducted part of his research at the SEC Future Health Technologies Lab at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and is currently a visiting researcher at the Harvard Statistical Reinforcement Learning Lab.