BIOCCOM

Many of today’s most pressing public health challenges have a strong behavioural component. More people than ever are living longer with chronic conditions such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, neurological and musculoskeletal diseases, and mental health problems. Behavioural, psychosocial, and environmental factors play a major role in the development and progression of chronic diseases. Behavior change for effective disease prevention and self-management support can improve treatment adherence, health outcomes, adjustment to diseases, and quality of life in people living with a chronic disease. The science of developing behavior change interventions, which have an impact for patients, strives to maximize the reach, effectiveness, adoption, implementation, and maintenance of these interventions. The expansion of new services and technologies, including mHealth technologies, offers opportunities to enhance the scope of delivery of multisectoral low-cost interventions to support behavior change and self-management at scale. It also enables to test novel emerging methods for rapid and agile intervention development. The main goal of this transdisciplinary project is to deepen our understanding and enhance competency to deliver innovative, effective, and evidence-based health behaviour-change intervention programmes in mainstream clinical practice. The potential benefits of behavioural interventions are multiple as they are often very low cost, scalable, and light touch. This is especially relevant within the context of underfunded and overstretched healthcare systems.