When we try and change our ways and our habits, we often recruit a bit of assistance in the shape of a coach or a trainer.  If we try and get fit, for instance, there are an army of personal trainers and coaches available to guide and assist us.  If we want to improve our corporate performance, we can call upon executive coaches to mentor us.

When it comes to improving our health however, our healthcare systems don’t really provide anything of that nature to us.  There is still more emphasis on treating people once they’re sick than on coaching and supporting people to either maintain or to return to a healthy lifestyle.

Of course, there are a growing number of mobile apps that provide a degree of guidance and support for various health related topics, whether exercise or diet, but as the poor success rate of new years resolutions shows us, having some personal guidance can often be a big help.

After all, our health is influenced by any number of things, whether it’s our level of education, our finances, cultural factors and even our relationship status.

Alas, with most visits to our GP lasting just a few minutes, there is precious little time to build up any kind of coaching relationship between doctor and patient.  Even with the various community health practitioners, they are often severely restrained by time and struggle to provide the kind of service they would like to.

So when patients can spend perhaps a few hours a year with a trained professional, how can they be coached towards better health?

Could our smartphones be pointing the way?  We’ve seen in the last few years the rise of virtual assistants, such as Siri on the iPhone.  Whilst initially these services were not much to talk about, they are getting better and better, to the point where they are actually quite useful these days.

We are also seeing the rise of services such as IBM’s Watson, that use an AI approach to providing an expert opinion on healthcare related topics.  With the processor power of modern smartphones rising so quickly, it doesn’t seem beyond the realms of possibility that we will soon have virtual assistants capable of providing not just simple lifestyle prompts (take your medication each morning, don’t eat that cake etc.), but more expansive roles too, such as making recommendations based upon the readings you provide it with.

Researcher Harm op den Akker from the University of Twente has also developed a system very much along these lines.  His system was tested over a three month period among users with a chronic lung disease.

These patients require regular physical activity, but the challenges of the condition can often result in patients not doing enough.  He developed a mobile based coaching system that advises patients when to rest and when to exercise.  It uses contextual clues such as the time of the day, the weather, the location of the patient and various other triggers to guide its recommendations.

What’s more, the system also takes the personality of the patient into account when addressing them.  So, if the patient is quite happy to be barked at bootcamp style, it will employ that approach.  If a softer approach is required, it can adapt accordingly.  All of this is undertaken via the learning algorithm built into the system.

It’s certainly an interesting approach, and whilst such systems won’t revolutionize healthcare just yet, I do think they are part of a growing trend that is responding to the challenging demands of the industry in an innovative way.