Single-Case Experimental Designs to Evaluate Novel Technology-Based Health Interventions

• DOI: 10.2196/jmir.2227
• Publication Date: 2013-02-08T18:35:12Z
• Authors: Jesse Dallery; Rachel N Cassidy; Bethany R Raiff
• Keywords: Quality Control; Internet; Computer applications to medicine. Medical informatics; Health Behavior; 05 social sciences; R858-859.7; Reproducibility of Results; Health Promotion; Telemedicine; 3. Good health; 03 medical and health sciences; Treatment Outcome; 0302 clinical medicine; Research Design; Tutorial; Humans; 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences; Public aspects of medicine; RA1-1270

Technology-based interventions to promote health are expanding rapidly. Assessing the preliminary efficacy of these interventions can be achieved by employing single-case experiments (sometimes referred to as n-of-1 studies). Although single-case experiments are often misunderstood, they offer excellent solutions to address the challenges associated with testing new technology-based interventions. This paper provides an introduction to single-case techniques and highlights advances in developing and evaluating single-case experiments, which help ensure that treatment outcomes are reliable, replicable, and generalizable. These advances include quality control standards, heuristics to guide visual analysis of time-series data, effect size calculations, and statistical analyses. They also include experimental designs to isolate the active elements in a treatment package and to assess the mechanisms of behavior change. The paper concludes with a discussion of issues related to the generality of findings derived from single-case research and how generality can be established through replication and through analysis of behavioral mechanisms.