Mobile and wireless technologies in health behavior and the potential for intensively adaptive interventions

• Advances in technology provide opportunities for intensively adaptive interventions (IAIs).
• Despite considerable interest, IAIs are largely untested.
• IAIs generate new research questions like the optimal intensity of intervention inputs/outputs.

Recent advances in mobile and wireless technologies have made real-time assessments of health behaviors and their influences possible with minimal respondent burden. These tech-enabled real-time assessments provide the basis for intensively adaptive interventions (IAIs). Evidence of such studies that adjust interventions based on real-time inputs is beginning to emerge. Although IAIs are promising, the development of intensively adaptive algorithms generate new research questions, and the intensive longitudinal data produced by IAIs require new methodologies and analytic approaches. Research considerations and future directions for IAIs in health behavior research are provided.