Improving Health of College Students through Agile Development of Sleep Behavior Interventions

A study was undertaken to examine and test the effectiveness of a self-experimentation model, guided by a mobile app called PACO, in helping college students improve behaviors associated with sleep. Thirteen participants were enrolled in this study and their nightly sleep quality and sleep duration were measured via PACO as they underwent three conditions: a baseline non-intervention phase, an expert-developed intervention phase, in which pre-made intervention examples were provided and used in PACO, and a self-experimentation phase, during which users were invited to develop their own sleep-behavior interventions using PACO. The participants were randomly placed into three groups, and the points of transition between phases was staggered across five weeks according to a multiple baseline design. The goal and hypothesis was to determine if sleep duration and sleep quality (sleep satisfaction) were improved in the final self-experimentation phase compared to the expert-developed experimentation phase and baseline phase, as well as in the expert-developed experimentation phase compared to the baseline phase. The results show little change, and nearly no improvement in the outcome measures between phases, leaving us unable to support the hypothesis. However, the existence of several limitations considered in retrospect, such as the small sample size, the short study time period, and technical difficulties with the PACO application means that no concrete conclusions should be made regarding the effectiveness of the self-experimentation model, nor the usability of PACO. Additional research should be made toward user motivation and modes of teaching the underlying behavioral science principles to casual users to increase effectiveness.