Supporting Self-Care with eHealth - Advancing Theory-Based Research and Development of Interventions to Support Patients with a Cardiovascular Disease
Roberto Rafael Cruz Martínez is a PhD candidate in the section of Psychology, Health & Technology, and he currently works as an information specialist for the service department of Embedded Information Services. (Co)Supervisors are prof.dr. Lisette van Gemert-Pijnen from the faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social sciences (BMS), prof. dr. Robbert Sanderman from BMS and the University of Groningen, and dr. Jobke Wentzel from Windesheim University of Applied Sciences.
Self-care can be defined as the process whereby individuals and their families maintain health through health-promoting practices and managing illness. Self-care entails many different behaviours, such as exercising, body listening or symptom monitoring, and decision-making processes such as choosing to call a doctor.
In 2005, the influential psychologist Albert Bandura characterised self-care as ‘good medicine’. He went even further, and stated that ‘if the huge benefits of these few habits were put into a pill, it would be declared a scientific milestone in the field of medicine.’
Certainly, reaching such a milestone would lead to a much needed reduction of the alarming burden on health care systems worldwide. This alarm is caused by the increasing amount of chronically ill individuals, many of them with a cardiovascular disease.
The use of digital technologies to support health, well-being, and health care holds high promise. Such an approach is better known by the term of electronic health or eHealth. eHealth promises to facilitate tasks, provide personalised information, feedback, and cues to action. Could eHealth become a self-care ‘pill’ to effectively support those who need it the most?
This work undertook a holistic approach to the study of eHealth research and development under the scope of self-care support for CVD. The research revised the contemporary use of frameworks, models, and theories for research and development, identified promising theory-based approaches to eHealth design, and proposed eHealth features that are based on self-care theory and technology design models.
By adopting and revising promising theories, the research successfully interconnected relevant constructs within the context of study. That is, the research identified promising eHealth design strategies that were theory-based and fitting with self-care as the target for behaviour change. The eHealth design strategies were primarily based and inspired by existing interventions but were also influenced by technology-focused frameworks for persuasive and value sensitive design. Through conceptual and theoretical work, the research endorsed and exemplified the vision that future eHealth research and development should start with theory and be continuously paired with it. Theory should at least be clearly acknowledged and detailed when used, but ideally, it should be fully and comprehensively adopted as part of holistic eHealth development, evaluation, and implementation.
