Designing Effective Personalization in Digital Health

Digital health interventions offer new opportunities to support people in adopting and maintaining health-promoting behaviours in everyday life. However, personalization often remains limited to adapting content, timing, or recommendations based on demographic, behavioural, or sensor data. This doctoral research project investigates how personalization can be designed more systematically to support sustainable health behaviour change.

The project combines perspectives from digital health, human-computer interaction, behavioural science, and psychology. It focuses particularly on health behaviours relevant to the long-term prevention of metabolic and other non-communicable diseases, including physical activity, nutrition, sleep, and stress management.

The research follows a multi-study approach combining evidence synthesis and empirical studies. It examines how personalization is currently conceptualized and implemented in digital health interventions and investigates how different interactive and AI-supported approaches can respond to individual characteristics, experiences, preferences, and changing needs over time.

The empirical work explores different approaches to designing personally relevant digital health experiences and investigates their potential to support motivation, reflection, engagement, and sustainable health behaviour. Particular attention is given to the interaction between technological personalization and the ways in which individuals perceive and make sense of health-related experiences.

The overarching goal is to contribute evidence-based design knowledge for effective, adaptive, and human-centred digital health interventions that can support long-term engagement and sustainable health behaviour.

This work forms part of Esther Federspiel’s doctoral research at the School of Medicine, University of St.Gallen (HSG) and is conducted in conjunction with her research activities at the Institute for Information and Process Management (IPM), OST – Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences. The doctoral research is supervised by Prof. Dr. Tobias Kowatsch, University of St.Gallen, with scientific collaboration and exchange involving Prof. Dr. Janna Hastings and Dr. Jacqueline Mair.