Interventions designed to influence people’s behaviour are a fundamental part of daily life. These can be personal advice, support and skills training from professionals such as doctors, or information disseminated through the media.
However, advice on coping with health problems can be costly and is not always readily available to everyone. The Internet is a low-cost way of extending convenient healthcare for millions of people around the world to access 24 hours a day.
Numerous internet-based behavioural interventions had been developed but, as each intervention had to be programmed from scratch, the initial developments costs were high and the intervention could not be easily modified once it had been programmed.
A multidisciplinary team at Southampton, including academics from Psychology and Electronics and Computer Science, wanted to develop cost-effective web-based interventions that researchers and practitioners in the public, private and third sectors could retain control over, modify and reuse without having to buy expensive web programming support.