Closing the Efficacy-Effectiveness Gap in Digital Health Behaviour Change

Digital health technologies, including mobile apps, wearables, chatbots and digital therapeutics, are increasingly promoted as tools to help people adopt and sustain healthier eating, physical activity, meditation and mindfulness practices, improved mental wellbeing, and better medication-taking. Yet evidence on whether these tools actually work, and on why engagement and adherence so often decline outside controlled trial settings, remains fragmented across single-behaviour silos and inconsistent outcome definitions. Closing this efficacy-effectiveness gap is essential if digital lifestyle interventions are to deliver measurable, lasting improvements in population health.The goal of this Research Topic is to bring together rigorous evidence on the effectiveness of digital health technologies for supporting healthy lifestyle behaviours, alongside research into the design, personalization and implementation factors that sustain real-world engagement and adherence. We will welcome studies that test whether specific digital tools work, as well as those exploring how and why adherence to them succeeds or fails once deployed outside the trial setting.Suitable themes for manuscripts include (but are not limited to):● Randomized controlled trials and other experimental or quasi-experimental studies testing the efficacy or effectiveness of digital health technologies (apps, wearables, chatbots, digital therapeutics) for improving diet, physical activity, meditation/mindfulness, mental health, or medication adherence, whether or not adherence itself is the primary outcome.● Observational and real-world studies examining predictors, mechanisms or determinants of sustained engagement and adherence to digital lifestyle interventions outside controlled trial conditions.● Comparative evaluations of AI-driven, human-delivered and hybrid coaching or support models for behaviour change.● Personalization, tailoring, and readiness-based or just-in-time adaptive intervention design.● Application of behavioural theory and behaviour-change-technique frameworks to digital tool design and evaluation.● Multi-behaviour or integrated digital interventions addressing more than one lifestyle domain concurrently (e.g., diet, activity and mental wellbeing together).● Implementation, scalability, cost-effectiveness and equity considerations in deploying digital lifestyle interventions across diverse populations and health systems.● Methodological and measurement contributions addressing how adherence, engagement and effectiveness should be defined, measured and reported.This Research Topic will welcome all Frontiers article types, including Original Research, Clinical Trial, Study Protocol and Systematic Review submissions, to capture both trial evidence on whether digital health technologies work and implementation research on sustaining their use in practice. No article types are excluded. Topic editors: Richard Kirwan, Tom Butler Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/84144/closing-the-efficacy-effectiveness-gap-in-digital-health-behaviour-change