Wellness Diary: A Mobile Phone Application for Health Promotion

Lifestyle related health risk factors, such as overweight and physical inactivity, account for more than a half of the disease burden in Europe. Healthy lifestyles would prevent many diseases and add quality and years to people's lives. However, lifestyle changes are difficult to maintain and the resources of the healthcare system to support people in this task are scarce. By combining behavioural knowledge of psychological models, such as the Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT), with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), more efficient and accessible support could potentially be provided to citizens. ICT may facilitate some tasks of psychological therapies which have traditionally been done manually, e.g., CBT-related self-observations and feedback. Respectively, ICT-tools for CBT may empower the citizen to take a greater role in health management. Especially mobile technologies seem promising. They are trusted and always carried along and thus available in situations where lifestyle choices are made. Nokia Wellness Diary (WD) is a mobile phone diary for recording and visualising health related self-observations, such as weight, exercise, stress, and sleep. Self-observations and automatic graphical feedback help individuals to continuously follow-up their wellness and the effects of their behavioural changes on health. Easy, fast and simple approach enables long-term self-observations, supporting wellness management as a long-term, sometimes a lifelong task. Long-term data also enables more advanced analyses for more in-depth information on health and behaviour, e.g., weekly rhythms of health parameters or the relationships between them. Data may also be shared with, e.g., a therapist, making WD a potential tool for supporting traditional psychotherapy or psychological interventions. In two user studies, WD was actively used by almost fifty users for three months, and was found easy to use and useful in wellness management.