An Ontology of Psychological Barriers to Support Behaviour Change

Helping people to adopt and maintain healthier lifestyles is a primary goal of behaviour change interventions. Successful interventions need to account for different barriers (informational, environmental, or psychological) that prevent people from engaging in healthy behaviours. Computational approaches to modelling these interventions focus primarily on informational needs, or on persuasive techniques. The study presented in this paper is specifically aimed at creating a formal conceptual model of the psychological notion of barriers to healthy behaviour, by means of an ontology,i.e. an explicit and machine readable specification of a conceptualisation shared by all the stakeholders~\citeStuder-et-al98. The model accounts for other related patient concepts to understand patient behaviour better. This machine-readable knowledge can function as a background to finding the right interventions for behaviour change. Whilst the model is generic and expandable to include other diseases and behaviours, our study uses type 2 diabetes to contextualise the problem of behaviour change.