Challenges and opportunities for e- and m-health-based behaviour change interventions

In 1993, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) made the World Wide Web freely available to the public. By the year 2000, already over 400 million people were connected, and this is also the time researchers started to think about how the Internet could be used to improve health behaviours.1,2 With the Internet being so novel and unknown, it is not surprising that the first trials were not very effective.3 Back then it was thought that building basic websites that provided health behaviour information would be sufficient to improve health behaviours. Unfortunately, it is not that simple and we now know that the most effective web-based interventions provide a high degree of interactivity (e.g. setting goals, self-monitoring, action planning, social interaction).