Effectiveness of a Personalized Health Profile on Specificity of Self-Management Goals

With a growing number of people living with chronic diseases, the need to empower people for self-management is rising. A key element in self-management is goal setting but the extent to which meaningful actionable goals (i.e., SMART) can be set without direction from the health care team is not known. Providing people with specific feedback on actionable health outcomes may stimulate the setting of specific goals. To this end, a health outcome profile was computer generated from the existing outcome measures, at first and last recorded visits, of each person enrolled in the Positive Brain Health Now (+BHN) cohort from 5 sites in Canada. This profile will be tested with BHN participants who agreed to enrolled in sub-studies. The main outcome will be the extent to which goals are SMART by using specific words and actionable verbs. A measurement framework and an initial lexical (i.e., collection of vocabularies) has been developed for the goal evaluation. Using text mining techniques (i.e., tokenizing and pos-tagging), the specific components of each goal will be extracted and compared to the lexical using regular expression algorithms. The result will provide information on the specificity of participants' defined goals.