Empower your wellness: setting SMART goals to live healthy in the digital age

Abstract

A growing population worldwide now recognizes wellness as a life priority. Optimal wellness can be achieved through formulating life habits of engaging in health-promoting behaviors but avoiding health-damaging behaviors. This mini-review begins with the notion that changing habit-based behaviors is challenging and requires personalized behavior counseling and environmental or situational manipulations. It outlines the important value of effective behavior management for healthy living. The iterative cycle of behavior management consists of SMART goal setting, behavior monitoring, and goal evaluation. Importantly, this behavior management process can be facilitated by artificial intelligence (AI) technology. The paper showcases the ProudMe intervention, which utilizes AI to facilitate the guided management of health-related behaviors among young adolescents. The ProudMe intervention also uses other health psychology strategies (e.g., functional social support, motivational interviewing) and additional intervention components across environmental settings to influence child behaviors and reduce obesity and health risks. Interventions like ProudMe usually demand careful manipulations to both individual and environmental factors in order to render significant public health impact.