Description:

Center for Behavior and Health

“The Role of Computational Multi-Scale Models in Behavioral Change”

Improvements of health-related behaviors will undoubtedly be an important part of future proactive and preventive healthcare. Consequently, behavioral interventions are expected to be essential in mitigating costs, loss of quality-of-life and increased morbidity caused by poor health behaviors. Despite the recognition of the importance of behavior change, helping people to improve their health behaviors has proven to be a significant challenge. In this presentation Dr. Pavel will discuss the potential of new technology-assisted approaches based on behavioral informatics – sensing, monitoring and inferring behaviors. The general idea is that the new wearable and mobile technology can “close the loop” in providing just-in-time assessment and intervention that has the potential to optimize interventions. An important pre-requisite for achieving this vision is the development of computational models that would allow us to predict behaviors and their changes. Dr. Pavel’s plan to provide a brief overview computational models in cognitive science and their application to behavioral informatics. He will discuss an approach that has the potential to combine existing theoretical constructs of behavior change with dynamical models characterizing dual process representation. He will illustrate this approach on a simple computational model based on the dual process framework applied to the recently published experimental data from the Make Better Choices Study (Spring et al 2012).

Misha Pavel, PhD
Professor of Practice
College of Computer & Information Science
& Bouve College of Health Sciences
Northeastern University

Friday, February 27, 2015
10:00am – 11:00 am
Department of Preventive Medicine
Stamler Conference Room
680 N. Lake Shore Drive 14th floor, Suite 1400

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