The Problem: One Size Fits All Lifestyle Interventions
Chronic conditions such as hypertension and type 2 diabetes are highly prevalent.
Approximately 20-70% of adults are affected, with nearly 30% experiencing prehypertension and 38% living with prediabetes.
Despite widespread awareness, lifestyle interventions often fall short due to:
- Generic, one size fits all recommendations
- Lack of alignment with individual routines, environments, and barriers
- Difficulty sustaining behavior change across diet, activity, sleep, and stress
The challenge is delivering personalized, adaptive support that reflects real-world behaviors and individual needs.
What is 4Me?
4ME is a personalized digital health program that delivers tailored messaging to support healthy behaviors across diet, physical activity, sleep, and stress.
The program combines passive data collection, user input, and behavioral insights to determine the right content, timing, and frequency of messages for each individual.
The program begins with a 2-week baseline monitoring period, during which participant data is collected to understand habits, needs, and areas for support.
4Me leverages:
- Passive data tracking (e.g., Fitbit for activity and sleep)
- Nutritional inputs (e.g., Bitesnap for dietary patterns)
- Survey-based insights to identify individual barriers and facilitators, including:
- Self-efficacy
- Health literacy
- Motivation
- Time constraints
- Social support
Based on this, participants receive personalized SMS messages (up to 10 per week) designed to:
- Reinforce healthy behaviors
- Address individual barriers
- Support achievable lifestyle changes
Participants also have access to a companion website, providing:
- Progress visualizations
- Goal tracking
- Educational resources
4Me adapts to individuals’ daily routines and environments, identifying the factors that influence behaviors such as diet, physical activity, and sleep, and delivering personalized support to address them.
4Me delivers an adaptive, data-driven approach to supporting sustainable behavior change.
Outcomes
4Me is designed to:
- Improve adherence to healthy lifestyle behaviors
- Delivering tailored support across diet, activity, sleep, and stress
- Increase personalization of health interventions
- Adapting messaging based on real-time data and individual barriers
- Support sustained behavior change
- Reinforcing habits through consistent, relevant communication
- Leverage real-world data for targeted engagement
- Using wearable and self-reported inputs to refine intervention delivery
- Provide scalable, individualized support
- Combining automation with behavioral insights to reach diverse populations
The Team
4Me was developed by:
- Dr. Azizi Seixas, PhD
- Associate Professor, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine
- Director, Media and Innovation Lab
Dr. Seixas specializes in behavioral health, cardiometabolic disease, and the development of personalized, technology-enabled interventions using machine learning and digital health tools.