Effective Techniques in Coronary Heart Disease Interventions: A meta-analysis (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Coronary heart disease (CHD) is a major cause of death worldwide. OBJECTIVE In this research, we investigated the effectiveness of digital interventions designed for the prevention and management of CHD. METHODS We searched three academic databases for scientific papers on CHD and digital interventions from 2004 to 2020, yielding 1706 papers and 1556 papers after deduplication. We further screened the titles and abstracts, excluding irrelevant papers, leaving 28 papers. A further nine papers were retrieved and included in the analysis through forward and backward referencing. We conducted meta-analysis using 13 of the 37 papers that fit the criteria for meta-analysis. We identified and classified intervention features using the Persuasive Systems Design model. Our findings show that digital health interventions had an impact on all clinical outcomes except Body Mass Index. RESULTS We present (1) intervention features that were associated with positive clinical outcomes, and (2) successful and unsuccessful interventions and the persuasive software features incorporated in them. Reminders, verifiability, social role, expertise, authority, tailoring, personalization, self-monitoring, praise, suggestion, and social learning principles were incorporated in interventions that succeeded in improving clinical outcomes. CONCLUSIONS Our research provides insights into persuasive software features that maintain powers to influence the effectiveness of CHD behavior change interventions.