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This is an invitation to researchers interested in developing internet-delivered behaviour change and health interventions.

THE LIFEGUIDE PROGRAMME

We are a team of health psychologists and computer scientists developing software that will allow researchers to easily and flexibly create and modify internet-delivered interventions. You will be able to design interventions that: give tailored advice based on the lay user's input; allow users to chart and check their progress; send follow-up messages to users in the form of personalised emails or texts; screen users for suitability for the intervention and randomise them to different intervention arms; and much more.

Once completed and fully tested (by the end of 2010), the LifeGuide programme will be made freely available to everyone as open-source software. But if you would like early access to the software (from January 2009), and an opportunity to influence what it does and how, then you are invited to join our network of researchers contributing to the development and early evaluation of this software. Researchers in this network will receive training in how to use the software to create internet-delivered interventions, and will provide us with feedback on how to improve the software. Network members will collaborate in developing and evaluating our first two planned interventions (to self-manage minor symptoms, and to increase physical activity), and will also be encouraged to use it to create, implement and evaluate any intervention they wish to.

If you are interested in finding out more about joining the LifeGuide development network, please email the coordinator, Judith Joseph (J.A.Joseph@soton.ac.uk). You are also encouraged to consider attending the next EHPS Synergy meeting (Bath, Sept 6th-8th, closing date for applications May 31st; www.ehps.net/synergy/ws2008/workshop2008.html) to meet members of the LifeGuide team, discuss issues relating to the design and development of internet interventions, and try out the first LifeGuide-developed intervention.

From the LifeGuide team:

Lucy Yardley and Judith Joseph (School of Psychology, University of Southampton)
Susan Michie (Centre for Outcomes Research and Effectiveness, University College London)
Gary Wills, David De Roure, Mark Weal and Jonathon Hare (School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton)

This work is funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, as part of the National Centre for e-Social Science.