Integrating health geography and behavioral economic principles to strengthen context-specific behavior change interventions.

Behavior change interventions are challenged by lack of information about the contexts influencing decisions patients make as part of their daily routine such as when, where, and how health behaviors occur. A new approach is required to strengthen behavior change interventions by integrating contexts of time and activity space so that strategies can be scaled across populations to influence how individuals make decisions about improving their health behaviors. Incorporating ideas from health geography and behavioral economics into the design of behavior change interventions provides an opportunity to collect and investigate individual-level health information characterizing contexts of individuals' activities across space, connections to place, time management, and patterns in behavior over time. By visualizing and characterizing key spatiotemporal contexts about an individual's day-to-day routine, insight can be gained about where and for how long activities occur and what opportunities exist for adapting day-to-day routines. This paper will discuss how theory from health geography could be applied to understand contexts influencing behaviors and how spatiotemporal information could be applied for the purpose of tailoring behavioral economic strategies to strengthen the design of behavior change interventions.