Towards personalised digital health services for preventable health conditions

To improve preventive health outcomes, a radical shift in thinking needs to be introduced to understand underlying causes of people’s subconscious behaviour to provide personalised digital health services in future; especially to support people most in need, eg. Māori. Currently, health data is mainly collected by using surveys which can lead to bias. The aim of this study is to build a multi-sensory environment that allows us to measure people’s behavioural and psychophysiological reactions (eg. rise of heart rate, sweat)

when placing them into different virtual environments using virtual reality technology and simulating different exposures, e.g. tobacco, different flavours of e-cigarette liquids, food, weather conditions, that can evoke different subconscious reactions. This will create a new and novel dataset in New Zealand using smoking as a case study and will include e-cigarette smoking and Māori study groups, to help design innovative smoking intervention and cessation tools and policies.