An Architecture for Pull-Based Public Health Interventions

Public health interventions consisting of information dissemination to affect behavior have long been a significant form of public health campaign. These interventions can be considered 'push-based' as they push information out to a population. New smartphone technologies for the first time provide a platform for a new type of informational public health intervention, which can be referred to as 'pull-based' interventions. In such interventions, it is the device via automatically collecting data relevant to the individual's health that triggers the 'request' for and receipt of the informational public health intervention. This will enable far more targeted and personalized public health interventions than previously possible. Such techniques do however also pose privacy and security challenges. In this paper we introduce the architecture for pull-based public health interventions upon smartphone devices that also provides strong privacy support. We also evaluate its performance and scalability benefits relative to non-pull-based interventions.