MyTrack+: Designing Supportive Digital Health Tools

Connecting patients and clinicians through technology-mediated experiences requires sensitivity, compassion, and care.

Details: Our partners in clinical health & health psychology came to us with a problem. The gold standard of care for achieving and maintaining a healthy weight included a 16-week intensive group program facilitated by experts trained in the intervention (“interventionists”). But with a U.S. population obesity rate estimated at 30% [source], offering this program to everyone was not a scalable solution. Mobile devices empower clinicians to place healthcare tools in the hands of patients, who can use them to access information at times and places convenient for them. We contributed to a clinical trial investigating a suite of different methods to deliver targeted notifications to patients during use of our mobile app; patients still attended (virtual) meetings of the 16-week program as well. Our lab also designed tailored data visualizations and toolkits to support interventionists in monitoring and assisting patients.

Team Members

Faculty

Dr. Lisa Anthony

We also collaborate on this project with Kathryn Ross and Jaime Ruiz.

Current Students

Yu-Peng Chen
Wanyi Min

Former Students

Julia Woodward
Katarina Jurczyk

Publications

Journal Articles

Kathryn M. Ross, Andrea Brockmann, Meena N. Shankar, Jaime Ruiz, Yu-Peng Chen, Lisa Anthony, and Michael G. Perri. 2026. The Benefit of Daily and “Real-Time” Logging of Dietary Intake for Weight Loss. Annals of Behavioral Medicine 60 (2026), S152–S152.
Kathryn M. Ross, Meena N. Shankar, Peihua Qiu, Zibo Tian, Jaime Ruiz, Lisa Anthony, and Michael G. Perri. 2025. Adaptive vs Monthly Support for Weight-Loss Maintenance: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA Network Open 8, 9 (2025), e2532681. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.32681
Kathryn M. Ross, Meena N. Shankar, Zibo Tian, Peihua Qiu, Jaime Ruiz, Lisa Anthony, and Michael G. Perri. 2025. Evaluation of an Adaptive Intervention for Promoting Long-Term Weight Loss Maintenance. International Journal of Behavioral Medicine 32, Suppl. 1 (2025), 176.
Kathryn M. Ross, Meena N. Shankar, Peihua Qiu, Zibo Tian, Taylor N. Swanson, Armaan Shetty, Jaime Ruiz, Lisa Anthony, and Michael G. Perri. 2024. Design of Project STAR: A randomized controlled trial evaluating the impact of an adaptive intervention on long-term weight-loss maintenance. Contemporary Clinical Trials 146 (2024), Article 107707. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cct.2024.107707
Yu-Peng Chen, Julia Woodward, Meena N. Shankar, Dinank Bista, Umelo Ugwoaba, Andrea Brockmann, Kathryn M. Ross, Jaime Ruiz, and Lisa Anthony. 2024. MyTrack+: Human-centered design of an mHealth app to support long-term weight loss maintenance. Frontiers in Digital Health 6 (2024), 1334058. https://doi.org/10.3389/fdgth.2024.1334058
Kathryn M. Ross, Lu You, Peihua Qiu, Meena N. Shankar, Taylor N. Swanson, Jaime Ruiz, Lisa Anthony, and Michael G. Perri. 2024. Predicting high-risk periods for weight regain following initial weight loss. Obesity 32, 1 (2024), 41–49. https://doi.org/10.1002/oby.23923
Kathryn M. Ross, Chelsea A. Carpenter, Kelsey M. Arroyo, Meena N. Shankar, Fan Yi, Peihua Qiu, Lisa Anthony, Jaime Ruiz, and Michael G. Perri. 2022. Impact of transition from face-to-face to telehealth on behavioral obesity treatment during the COVID-19 pandemic. Obesity 30, 4 (2022), 858–863. https://doi.org/10.1002/oby.23383

Refereed Conference Papers

Yu-Peng Chen, Julia Woodward, Dinank Bista, Xuanpu Zhang, Ishvina Singh, Oluwatomisin Obajemu, Meena N. Shankar, Kathryn M. Ross, Jaime Ruiz, and Lisa Anthony. 2024. Investigating Contextual Notifications to Drive Self-Monitoring in mHealth Apps for Weight Maintenance. In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 993, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3641993

Other Papers

Julia Woodward, Yu-Peng Chen, Katarina Jurczyk, Kathryn M. Ross, Lisa Anthony, and Jaime Ruiz. 2021. A Survey of Notification Designs in Commercial mHealth Apps. In Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 232, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3451639

Read Yu-Peng’s Ph.D. thesis based in this project here.

Funding

This work is partially supported by National Institutes of Health grant award #R01DK119244. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect these agencies’ views.

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