Rapidly Personalizing Mobile Health Treatment Policies with Limited Data

Mobile health (mHealth) interventions deliver treatments to users to support healthy behaviors. These interventions offer an opportunity for social impact in a diverse range of domains from substance abuse (Rabbi et al., 2017), to disease management (Hamine et al., 2015) to physical inactivity (Consolvo et al., 2008). For example, to help users increase their physical activity, an mHealth application might send a walking suggestions at times and in locations when a user is likely to be able to pursue the suggestions. The promise of mHealth hinges on the ability to provide interventions at times when users need the support and are receptive to it (Nahum-Shani et al., 2017). Consequently, in developing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for mHealth our goal is to be able to learn an optimal policy of when and how to intervene for a given user and context.