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.