ChangeGradients: Promoting Adolescent Health Behavior Change

Official title

Promoting Adolescent Health Behavior Change With Clinically Integrated Sample-Efficient Policy Gradient Methods

Overview

As most adolescents visit a healthcare provider once a year, health behavior change interventions linked to clinic-based health information technologies hold significant promise for improving healthcare quality and subsequent behavioral health outcomes for adolescents (Baird, 2014, Harris, 2017). Recognizing the potential to leverage recent advances in machine learning and interactive narrative environments, the investigators are now well positioned to design health behavior change systems that extend the reach of clinicians to realize significant impacts on behavior change for adolescent preventive health. The proposed project centers on the design, development, and evaluation of a clinically-integrated health behavior change system for adolescents. CHANGEGRADIENTS will introduce an innovative reinforcement learning-based feedback loop in which adolescent patients interact with personalized behavior change interactive narratives that are dynamically personalized and realized in a rich narrative-centered virtual environment. CHANGEGRADIENTS will iteratively improve its behavior change models using policy gradient methods for Reinforcement Learning (RL) designed to optimize adolescents' achieved behavior change outcomes. This in turn will enable CHANGEGRADIENTS to generate more effective behavior change narratives, which will then lead to further improved behavior change outcomes. With a focus on risky behaviors and an emphasis on alcohol use, adolescents will interact with CHANGEGRADIENTS to develop an experiential understanding of the dynamics and consequences of their alcohol use decisions. The proposed project holds significant transformative potential for (1) producing theoretical and practical advances in how to realize significant impacts on adolescent health behavior change through novel interactive narrative technologies integrated with policy-based reinforcement learning, (2) devising sample-efficient policy gradient methods for RL that produce personalized behavior change experiences by integrating theoretically based models of health behavior change with data-driven models of interactive narrative generation, and (3) promoting new models for integrating personalized health behavior change technologies into clinical care that extend the effective reach of clinicians.

Detailed description

STUDY AIMS:

I. Design, develop, and iteratively refine a policy-based reinforcement learning behavior change system for preventive adolescent health (Part 1).

II. Investigate the impact of a clinically integrated sample-efficient policy gradient-based behavior change system on adolescent behavior (Part 2).

The project will culminate with an investigation of the behavioral effects of the CHANGEGRADIENTS system using adolescent patients recruited from two outpatient primary care clinics within the UCSF Department of Pediatrics: Mt. Zion Pediatrics and the Adolescent/Young Adult Clinic. It is hypothesized that adolescents who interact with CHANGEGRADIENTS will reduce number of days of alcohol use, reduce binge drinking, and increase self-efficacy to engage in healthy behavior and avoid risky substance use.

It is anticipated that CHANGEGRADIENTS will provide a testbed for a broad range of health behavior change research and serve as the foundation for next generation personalized preventive healthcare through computationally enabled behavior change that is designed to be tightly integrated into clinical practice workflow. By taking advantage of the high degree of adaptive interactivity offered by its personalized behavior change environment, CHANGEGRADIENTS holds significant potential for creating compelling interactions that promote self-efficacy and engagement in healthy lifestyle behaviors to prevent cancer through improving cancer-related behaviors and risk factors.

PART 1 of the study (Focus Group) has closed to enrollment.

PART 2 of the study (Randomized Clinical Trial) is planned for enrollment upon finalization of data collected in Part 1.

Interventions

• Behavioral ChangeGradients
  CHANGEGRADIENTS is an interactive web-based tool which includes narrative-centered behavior change experiences that are dynamically generated.

Primary outcome measures

• Mean scores on assessment of Alcohol Use [Time frame: 30 days]
• Mean score on a Self-efficacy tool developed by Drs Elizabeth Ozer and Dr. Albert Bandura [Time frame: 30 days]
• Quality of Care: Adolescent Report of the Visit (AROV) [Time frame: 1 day, immediately following baseline clinic visit]

Eligibility criteria

Inclusion criteria

• Adolescents between the ages of 15 and 17 years of age
• Report current alcohol use
• Presenting for a well-visit at UCSF Pediatric primary care clinics (the Mt. Zion Pediatric Primary Care Practices at UCSF and The Adolescent/Young Adult Clinic at UCSF)

Exclusion criteria

• Non-English speakers

Criteria are shown verbatim from the registry (in English). Final eligibility is always assessed by the study center.

Healthy volunteers: Yes

Study design

Allocation

Randomized

Model

Parallel assignment

Masking

Open label

Primary purpose

Prevention

Study locations

United States · 1 center

• University of California San Francisco Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine Clinic — San Francisco

Publications

• Baird A, Nowak S. Why primary care practices should become digital health information hubs for their patients. BMC Fam Pract. 2014 Nov 25;15:190. doi: 10.1186/s12875-014-0190-9. PMID 25421733
• Harris SK, Aalsma MC, Weitzman ER, Garcia-Huidobro D, Wong C, Hadland SE, Santelli J, Park MJ, Ozer EM. Research on Clinical Preventive Services for Adolescents and Young Adults: Where Are We and Where Do We Need to Go? J Adolesc Health. 2017 Mar;60(3):249-260. doi: 10.1016/j.jadohealth.2016.10.005. Epub 2016 Dec 20. PMID 28011064
• Ozer EM, Bandura A. Mechanisms governing empowerment effects: a self-efficacy analysis. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1990 Mar;58(3):472-86. doi: 10.1037//0022-3514.58.3.472. PMID 2324938
• Ozer EM, Adams SH, Orrell-Valente JK, Wibbelsman CJ, Lustig JL, Millstein SG, Garber AK, Irwin CE Jr. Does delivering preventive services in primary care reduce adolescent risky behavior? J Adolesc Health. 2011 Nov;49(5):476-82. doi: 10.1016/j.jadohealth.2011.02.011. Epub 2011 Jun 8. PMID 22018561
• Sanci L, Chondros P, Sawyer S, Pirkis J, Ozer E, Hegarty K, Yang F, Grabsch B, Shiell A, Cahill H, Ambresin AE, Patterson E, Patton G. Responding to Young People's Health Risks in Primary Care: A Cluster Randomised Trial of Training Clinicians in Screening and Motivational Interviewing. PLoS One. 2015 Sep 30;10(9):e0137581. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0137581. eCollection 2015. PMID 26422235
• Ozer EM, Adams SH, Lustig JL, Millstein SG, Wibbelsman CJ, Babb J. The effect of preventive services on adolescent behavior (abstract). Pediatric Research. 2004;53(suppl. 4, pt. 2):265A.
• Ozer EM. The impact of childcare responsibility and self-efficacy on the psychological health of working mothers. Psychology of Women Quarterly. 1995;19:315-35.
• Ozer E, Rowe J, Tebb K, Culbertson K, Berna M, Jasik C, et al. A self-adaptive personalized behavior change system for adolescent preventive care. The Indian Journal of Pediatrics, Special Supplement The International Association for Adolescent Health, 11th World Congress on Adolescent Health, 27-29 October, 2017, New Delhi, India2017. p. SS-1.

Identifiers

NCT: NCT04110756 · 19-28893 · R01CA247705

Primary sources (government registries)

• ClinicalTrials.gov (US NIH)

View this study on ClinicalTrials.gov ↗