The person-based approach was developed by Lucy Yardley and colleagues over a decade ago as an approach for developing digital interventions to help people cope with their health. The approach focuses on the perspectives and experiences of the target users and emphasises understanding the needs, preferences, and contexts of individuals for designing the most engaging and effective digital interventions. The person-based approach originates from digital interventions to promote health-related behaviour change such as the POWeR weight management intervention.
The person-based approach has two key principles:
- Utilising qualitative research with a diverse range of target users at every stage of intervention development. In particular this development work focuses on the deep understanding of the psychological context of the target users and their perspectives on the behavioural features of the intervention. These insights can be used to modify the digital intervention to create a more effective and relevant end product.
- Creating “guiding principles” that can lead the intervention development by highlighting specifically how the intervention will address key context-specific behavioural issues to meet the intervention objectives.
The person-based approach offers a structured framework for developing digital health interventions that are deeply rooted in the lived experiences of target users, thereby increasing their potential effectiveness in promoting health behaviour change.
Resources
- A paper describing the person-centred approach for developing successful digital interventions to help people manage their health or illness, which focuses on understanding and accommodating the perspectives of the people who will use the intervention: The Person-Based Approach to Intervention Development: Application to Digital Health-Related Behavior Change Interventions
- An article describing a Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) led creative workshop space held within a clinical trial of a digital therapy for distressing voices (AVATAR2): “There’s no us vs. them, it’s just us”: a creative approach to centring lived experience within the AVATAR2 trial.
- An article describing the RELAX study which evaluates a digital therapy to help with worry and anxious thoughts during pregnancy. This includes a section on the work with PPIE representatives to ensure that the needs of the ultimate beneficiaries of the research (pregnant women/service users) remain central to the project: RELAX (REducing Levels of AnXiety): a study protocol for a parallel two-arm randomised controlled trial evaluating a web-based early intervention for pregnant women with high levels of repetitive negative thinking to prevent escalating anxiety during pregnancy and after birth.