JustIn: Accelerating Just-In-Time Adaptive Intervention Optimization
Background: This project is currently my primary focus. Previously, I built two just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs) aimed at promoting healthy eating and physical activity. Because of that background, this project’s goal—tackling the technical barriers hindering JITAI development—deeply resonates with me.
Through this work, I have been able to leverage my software development experience, dive deeper into software architecture design, and place a strong emphasis on improving the developer experience (DX) for this framework.
My role(s): Researcher, Developer
Collaborator(s): José-Antonio Rubio, Dr. Mark W. Newman, Dr. Pedja Klansnja, Dr. Susan Murphy, Dr. Inbal Billie Nahum-Shani
Motivation: While Just-in-Time Adaptive Interventions (JITAIs) offer a transformative approach to digital health, their deployment is blocked by a "technical tax" that drains research budgets and stalls progress. Current development suffers from prohibitive engineering overhead, forcing researchers to build infrastructure from scratch only to end up with non-standardized, "disposable" architecture that requires a total rewrite for future studies. Furthermore, opaque, closed-source ecosystems create vendor lock-in and rigid roadmaps, forcing experts to either abandon novel ideas or invest in costly custom code.
Problem Solving: I operate at the intersection of behavioral science and software engineering through a continuous, three-step lifecycle. The process begins in the field, where I embed within active pilot studies to uncover real-world technical barriers and participant needs firsthand. From there, I translate those raw field insights and ad-hoc scripts into a standardized software framework built on reusable patterns. Finally, these patterns integrate into a cohesive ecosystem of interoperable tools that handle heavy engineering—allowing researchers to seamlessly plug in custom study logic and deploy those tools right back into the field for the next iteration.
Field Deployment
3 JITAI pilot studies
Distillation
1 open-source package
Integrated Ecosystem
Outcomes:
The initial outcome of this project is a foundational open-source package designed to scaffold decision rules—the core 'brain' of a Just-In-Time Adaptive Intervention (JITAI). Additional packages are currently in development.
Date: 2022-Present.
