gms | German Medical Science

Behaviour change is essential if major health problems such as obesity and cancer are to be tackled. Evidence is needed by researchers, policy-makers and practitioners about intervention effectiveness across contexts, and about mechanisms of action. Such evidence is currently produced on a vast but fragmented scale and more rapidly than humans can synthesise and access. Computers have the capacity and speed to do this task but lack the organisational structure to do this successfully. Progress in this area requires a collaboration between computer and behavioural scientists to develop a knowledge structure (‘ontology’) and apply it to the evidence, and information science to support the curation and access of evidence.

The Human Behaviour Change Project (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/human-behaviour-change) brings together behavioural, computer and information scientists to build an Artificial Intelligence system to continually scan the world literature on behaviour change, extract key information and use this to build and update the scientific understanding of human behaviour to answer variants of the ‘big question’: ‘What works, compared with what, how well, for whom, in what settings, for what behaviours and why?