Empowering the Aging with Mobile Health: A mHealth Framework for Supporting Sustainable Healthy Lifestyle Behavior

Healthcare providers are shifting to a value-based model that acknowledges the importance of a healthy lifestyle for managing chronic disease and mental health. This approach empowers patients to adopt and/or sustain healthy lifestyle choices through the use of innovative technologies—providing beneficial ways of delivering health literacy, self-monitoring, and patient–provider collaboration. Such pathways have the potential to enable healthy lifestyle management for a growing U.S. cohort—the “baby boomer” generation (BBG)—who are at risk for developing heart disease, stroke, arthritis, high cholesterol, and diabetes, etc. In this paper, we argue for a new mHealthy lifestyle management (MLM) model that uses mobile health technology as a means to engage BBG consumers in ways that establish their role in self-care and decision-making, as well as patient–provider collaboration that can significantly impact sustainable healthy lifestyle behaviors. By merging the domains of health informatics and human factors psychology, MLM addresses the complex challenges associated with patient–provider collaborative work, while offering a healthcare framework to BBGs in their quest to self-manage a physical and/or mental healthy lifestyle. A MLM use-case highlights the challenges and solutions for team-based clinical counseling. Finally, recommendations for future MLM tools are outlined that support patient access to personal health eTools, information, and services.