One of the longstanding challenges of mental health interventions has been the difficulty in tailoring programs to the needs of individual people. New technology has made it possible to customize the type and amount of support we give an individual based on the state of that person.
As part of the Institute for Translational Research’s colloquium series, we are excited to host Harvard University researcher Walter Dempsey to discuss his work on “just-in-time” adaptive interventions aimed at providing the right type/amount of support, at the right time, by adapting to the changing state of the individual. He’ll also discuss the stratified micro-randomized trial (sMRT).
Dr. Dempsey is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Statistics at Harvard University interested in developing and analyzing methods for joint modeling of longitudinal and time-to-event data.
WHEN: Friday, April 20 | Noon to 1:30 p.m.
WHERE: ITR Offices, 1100 S Washington Avenue, Suite 102 (map)
WHO: Dr. Walter Dempsey, Harvard University
RSVP: z.umn.edu/dempsey
Free parking is available and light refreshments will be served.
Full abstract: A just-in-time adaptive intervention (JITAI) is an intervention design aimed at providing the right type/amount of support, at the right time, by adapting to the changing state of the individual. In the first half of this talk, we discuss the scientific motivation of JITAIs and define their key components. We present several mobile health trials in substance use and mental health that generate data that can then be used to inform the construction of JITAIs.
A critical question in the development of JITAIs is, when and in which contexts, is it most useful to push intervention content to the user. This question concerns time-varying dynamic moderation by the context on the effectiveness of in-the-moment interventions on user behavior. In the second half of this talk, we discuss the stratified micro-randomized trial (sMRT) design and present a smoking cessation sMRT designed to assess nested effects of momentary interventions.
