Digital Episodic Future Thinking Intervention (Luminaut): Co-Design and Iterative Development Study

Digital health interventions can be effective at changing behavior, but achieving long-term adherence remains a challenge. One psychological barrier to health behavior change is future discounting, or the tendency to prefer smaller, short-term rewards over larger, long-term rewards. Episodic Future Thinking (EFT) can disrupt future discounting and is a promising technique for improving health behavior, but such interventions have not been co-designed to address end user needs.

This study aimed to co-design an app with end users to deliver an EFT intervention aimed at promoting health behavior change in those in the prerisk phase for chronic conditions.

Community members participated in up to 2 series of face-to-face co-design workshops. A prototype of the app was reviewed, and insights were gathered to understand (1) the optimal characteristics of the app and (2) the concepts of future discounting and EFT. Themes were generated using inductive thematic analysis.

Participants were South Australian adults (n=30) who were predominately affluent women (27/30, 90%) aged 25-44 years (mean 36.37, SD 5.65 years). Feedback generated from the first workshop series resulted in 26 suggestions of which 15 informed iterative app development. Higher-level principles were identified and categorized into 5 overarching themes: concept acceptance, triggers and barriers, personalization, gamification, and user-friendly interface.

This study used co-design methodology to develop an app-based EFT intervention. Ongoing engagement with end users and key stakeholders (eg, health care professionals) is needed to ensure that the app meets changing needs. Future work will aim to evaluate its effectiveness in a large-scale clinical trial.