Personal Health and Wellness Management: Citizen Empowerment through Mobile Technologies. Invited

Lifestyle related health risks are increasing rapidly, resulting in increased morbidity, lost productivity and high costs to society. These problems could be largely prevented or alleviated by adopting healthier lifestyles. However, lifestyle changes are not easy to achieve and they are even more difficult to maintain. Moreover, the healthcare system does not have the resources to provide early interventions. We believe that the solution is to recognize that health risk maintaining mechanisms are behaviors, which may be efficiently managed through appropriate application of modern psychological theories and procedures of behavioural change. Of these, the Cognitive Behavioral therapy (CBT) is one of the most attractive ones, emphasizing the role of learning in behavior change. Wellness Diary (WD) is a mobile phone application for personal wellness management based on CBT. The studies conducted with WD have shown it to be a well accepted and useful wellness management tool and also suitable for long term use.