Enhancing the IDEAS Framework with Ontology: Designing Digital Interventions for Improving Cancer Patients' Wellbeing

Developing effective digital interventions to help patients form healthy habits is a challenging goal. IDEAS is a step-by-step framework that allows developers to draw ideas from intended users and behavioral theories, and ideate implementation strategies for them, followed by rapid prototype development. Based on our long experience with developing generic knowledge-based clinical decision support systems (CDSS) and integrating them with electronic health records (EHR) to deliver patient-specific advice, we observed a challenge that IDEAS is not addressing: the semantic detailing of the clinical knowledge behind the digital intervention and relevant patient data that could be used to personalize the digital intervention. To close the gap, we augmented two steps of IDEAS with an ontology that structures the target behavior as classes, derived from HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources standard. We exemplify the augmented IDEAS with a case study taken from the Horizon 2020 CAPABLE project, that uses Fogg's Tiny Habits behavioral model to improve the sleep of cancer patients via Tai Chi.