Olga Perski

Olga Perski
University of California, San Diego | UCSD · Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science

BSc; MSc; PhD

About

151
Publications
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3,384
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Publications

Publications (151)
Preprint
Full-text available
Technology-mediated just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs), which provide users with real-time, tailored behavioural support, are a promising innovation for smoking cessation. However, a greater understanding of stakeholder, including user, perspectives on JITAIs is needed. Focus groups with UK-based adult smokers (three groups; N=19) and smo...
Article
Full-text available
Background Digital technologies offer the potential for low-cost, scalable delivery of interventions to promote smoking cessation. Objective We aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of the offer of Smoke Free—an evidence-informed, widely used app—for smoking cessation versus no support. Methods In this 2-arm randomized controlled trial, 3143 motiva...
Article
Full-text available
Background Cigarette smoking is one of the leading causes of morbidity in the world. Virtual reality (VR) has been used to encourage and support quit attempts. However, interest in VR may differ according to sociodemographic characteristics. This study aimed to estimate the proportion and associated characteristics of smokers in Great Britain who w...
Preprint
Background and aims: Among smokers attempting to stop, temporary slips or lapses are common and typically lead to a return to regular smoking (‘relapse’). Under certain conditions, however, the person bounces back despite a few lapses (‘prolapse’), or lapses are avoided altogether (‘abstinence’). These well-established empirical phenomena notwithst...
Article
Full-text available
Specific moments of lapse among smokers attempting to quit often lead to full relapse, which highlights a need for interventions that target lapses before they might occur, such as just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs). To inform the decision points and tailoring variables of a lapse prevention JITAI, we trained and tested supervised machine...
Article
Full-text available
This is a process evaluation of a large UK-based randomised controlled trial (RCT) ( n = 5602) evaluating the effectiveness of recommending an alcohol reduction app, Drink Less, compared with usual digital care in reducing alcohol consumption in increasing and higher risk drinkers. The aim was to understand whether participants’ engagement (‘self-r...
Article
Prior research indicates that digital smoking cessation interventions can be effective, but little is known about their active ingredients. Therefore, this review aimed to examine the associations of content (behaviour change techniques [BCTs]), delivery features (delivery mode, readability, ease-of-use), and socioeconomic position with effectivene...
Preprint
The dominant approaches in health psychology have remained stagnant for decades (Chevance et al., 2021). Quantitative studies often employ variations on linear models, rarely questioning underlying assumptions and their implications. Qualitative studies, too, have seen little methodological progress, often applying a variation of coding the data in...
Article
Full-text available
Virtual reality (VR) could be used to deliver messages to smokers that encourages them to attempt quitting. For a VR smoking cessation intervention to be effective, the target population must find the content engaging, relevant, inoffensive, and compelling. Informed by health behaviour theory and narrative transportation theory, this study used foc...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Our aim was to assess, in the general German population, the association between tobacco smoking status and self-reported SARS-CoV-2 infection, COVID-19 symptom severity, and symptom duration. Methods: Cross-sectional household survey with face-to-face interviews of representative samples of the German population conducted between 02/20...
Preprint
The development, evaluation, and implementation of digital health interventions requires contributions from scientists, healthcare professionals, and developers. Albeit exciting, interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral collaboration is challenging and so often slow and its impact limited. By outlining challenges and potential action-oriented solutions...
Article
Substance use disorders (SUDs) have an enormous negative impact on individuals, families, and society as a whole. Most individuals with SUDs do not receive treatment because of the limited availability of treatment providers, costs, inflexible work schedules, required treatment-related time commitments, and other hurdles. A paradigm shift in the pr...
Article
Background Several personality traits have been linked to addictive behaviours, including smoking and excessive drinking. We hypothesised that the combination of low conscientiousness, high extraversion and high neuroticism would be synergistically associated with smoking, excessive drinking and both behaviours combined. Methods Respondents aged 16...
Preprint
Introduction: Specific moments of lapse among smokers attempting to quit often lead to full relapse, which highlights a need for interventions that target lapses before they might occur, such as just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs). To inform the decision points and tailoring variables of a JITAI for lapse prevention, we trained and tested...
Preprint
Full-text available
This scoping review aimed to synthesise the methodological steps taken by researchers in the development of formal, dynamical systems models of health psychology theories pertaining to health behaviours unfolding at the within-person level. We searched Ovid MEDLINE, PsycINFO, the ACM Digital Library and IEEE in July 2023. We included studies of any...
Article
Full-text available
Background Adopting a healthy diet is one of the cornerstones of type 2 diabetes (T2D) management. Apps are increasingly used in diabetes self-management, but most studies to date have focused on assessing their impact in terms of weight loss or glycemic control, with limited evidence on the behavioral factors that influence app use to change dieta...
Preprint
Full-text available
This is a process evaluation of a large UK-based randomised controlled trial (RCT) (n = 5,602) evaluating the effectiveness of recommending an alcohol reduction app, Drink Less, compared with usual digital care in reducing alcohol consumption in increasing and higher risk drinkers. The aim was to understand whether participants’ engagement (‘self-r...
Article
Full-text available
Background With the proliferation of digital mental health interventions (DMHIs) guided by relational agents, little is known about the behavioral, cognitive, and affective engagement components associated with symptom improvement over time. Obtaining a better understanding could lend clues about recommended use for particular subgroups of the popu...
Preprint
Full-text available
Objective: To assess the role of self-reported desire over obligation in explaining continued smoking abstinence in recent ex-smokers. Method: A 12-month prospective study of 230 (45.2% female; mean age 45.4 years) adults in England who confirmed they had made a serious quit attempt and were not currently smoking at baseline. The predictor variable...
Preprint
BACKGROUND Digital technologies offer the potential for low-cost, scalable delivery of interventions to promote smoking cessation. OBJECTIVE We aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of the offer of Smoke Free—an evidence-informed, widely used app—for smoking cessation versus no support. METHODS In this 2-arm randomized controlled trial, 3143 motiva...
Preprint
UNSTRUCTURED Digital therapeutics (DTx) are a promising way to provide safe, effective, accessible, sustainable, scalable, and equitable approaches to advance individual and population health. However, developing and deploying DTx is inherently complex in that DTx includes multiple interacting components, such as tools to support activities like me...
Article
Digital therapeutics (DTx) are a promising way to provide safe, effective, accessible, sustainable, scalable, and equitable approaches to advance individual and population health. However, developing and deploying DTx is inherently complex in that DTx includes multiple interacting components, such as tools to support activities like medication adhe...
Article
Full-text available
Background The extent to which interventions are perceived as acceptable to users impacts engagement and efficacy. Objective In this study, we evaluated the acceptability of (1) the smartphone app Drink Less (intervention) and (2) the National Health Service (NHS) alcohol advice web page (usual digital care and comparator) among adult drinkers in...
Preprint
Full-text available
BACKGROUND The extent to which interventions are perceived as acceptable to users impacts engagement and efficacy. OBJECTIVE In this study, we evaluated the acceptability of (1) the smartphone app Drink Less (intervention) and (2) the National Health Service (NHS) alcohol advice web page (usual digital care and comparator) among adult drinkers in...
Preprint
BACKGROUND Adopting a healthy diet is one of the cornerstones of type 2 diabetes (T2D) management. Apps are increasingly used in diabetes self-management, but most studies to date have focused on assessing their impact in terms of weight loss or glycemic control, with limited evidence on the behavioral factors that influence app use to change dieta...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction: Smoking lapses after the quit date often lead to full relapse. To inform the development of real-time, tailored lapse prevention support, we used observational data from a popular smoking cessation app to develop supervised machine learning algorithms to distinguish lapse from non-lapse reports. Methods: We used data from app users...
Preprint
BACKGROUND With the proliferation of digital mental health interventions (DMHIs) guided by relational agents, little is known about the behavioral, cognitive and affective engagement components associated with symptom improvement over time. Obtaining a better understanding could lend clues about recommended use for particular subgroups of the popul...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Several personality traits have been linked to addictive behaviours, including smoking and excessive drinking. We hypothesised that the combination of low conscientiousness, high extraversion and high neuroticism would be synergistically associated with smoking, excessive drinking and both behaviours combined. Methods: Respondents aged...
Article
Full-text available
Background and aims: When attempting to stop smoking, discrete smoking events ('lapses') are strongly associated with a return to regular smoking ('relapse'). No study has yet pooled the psychological and contextual antecedents of lapse incidence, captured in Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) studies. This systematic review and meta-analysis a...
Preprint
Full-text available
Aim To evaluate the effectiveness of the offer of Smoke Free – an evidence-informed, widely used app – for smoking cessation versus no support. Design Two-arm individually randomised controlled effectiveness trial. Setting Online with no restrictions on location. Participants 3,143 adult smokers (74.7% female; mean[SD] age 49.0 [11.5] years) mot...
Chapter
As early career researchers (ECRs), our work and scientific practices are situated in a fast-changing and ever-evolving research landscape. We also live in times of great geopolitical and economic uncertainty. At the time of writing, we are in the midst of a global viral pandemic, with a need for rapid scientific insight into how the SARS-CoV-2 vir...
Article
Full-text available
Background: The first UK COVID-19 lockdown had a polarising impact on drinking behaviour and may have impacted engagement with digital interventions to reduce alcohol consumption. Objective: We examined the effect of lockdown on engagement, alcohol reduction and the socio-demographic characteristics among users of the popular and widely availabl...
Preprint
BACKGROUND The first UK COVID-19 lockdown had a polarising impact on drinking behaviour and may have impacted engagement with digital interventions to reduce alcohol consumption. OBJECTIVE We examined the effect of lockdown on engagement, alcohol reduction and the socio-demographic characteristics among users of the popular and widely available al...
Article
BACKGROUND: Little is known about how individuals engage over time with smartphone app interventions and whether this engagement predicts health outcomes. OBJECTIVE: In the context of a randomized trial comparing 2 smartphone apps for smoking cessation, this study aimed to determine distinct groups of smartphone app log-in trajectories over a 6-mon...
Article
Full-text available
Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) involves repeated, real-time sampling of health behaviours in context. We present the state-of-knowledge in EMA research focused on five key health behaviours (physical activity and sedentary behaviour, dietary behaviour, alcohol consumption, tobacco smoking, sexual health), summarising theoretical (e.g., psych...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background and Aims: When attempting to stop smoking, discrete smoking events (‘lapses’) are strongly associated with a return to regular smoking (‘relapse’). No study has yet pooled the psychological and contextual antecedents of lapse incidence, captured in Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) studies. This systematic review and meta-analysis ai...
Preprint
Full-text available
Temporary smoking episodes after the quit date ('lapses') often lead to full relapse. Real-time support delivered via technology-mediated just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs) offer a promising means of preventing lapses. To inform JITAI development, we used observational data from a popular smoking cessation app ('Smoke Free') to develop su...
Article
Full-text available
Background Engagement with smartphone apps for smoking cessation tends to be low. Chatbots (ie, software that enables conversations with users) offer a promising means of increasing engagement. Objective We aimed to explore smokers’ experiences with a quick-response chatbot (Quit Coach) implemented within a popular smoking cessation app and identi...
Article
Full-text available
Individual-level interventions for smokers unmotivated to quit remain scarce and have had limited success. Little is known about the potential of virtual reality (VR) for delivering messaging to smokers unmotivated to quit. This pilot trial aimed to assess the feasibility of recruitment and acceptability of a brief, theory-informed VR scenario and...
Article
Full-text available
Smoking prevalence in several high-income countries is steadily declining but remains persistently high in ‘lower’ socioeconomic position (SEP) groups, contributing to inequities in morbidity and mortality. Smoking to relieve stress is a commonly endorsed motive for continued smoking; however, it remains unclear whether smoking to relieve stress ha...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Little is known about how individuals engage over time with smartphone application interventions and whether this engagement predicts health outcomes. Objective: In the context of a randomized trial comparing two smartphone applications (apps) for smoking cessation, to determine: (1) distinct groups of smartphone app login trajectori...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction: It has been estimated that smokers tend to fail to report unsuccessful quit attempts that lasted a short time and occurred a longer time ago. However, it is unclear whether the failure to report unsuccessful quit attempts varies by the type of cessation aid used. Methods: A total of 5,892 smokers aged 16+ years who had made 1+ quit...
Preprint
BACKGROUND Drink Less is a behavior change app to help higher-risk drinkers in the United Kingdom reduce their alcohol consumption. The app includes a daily notification asking users to “ Please complete your drinks and mood diary, ” yet we did not understand the causal effect of the notification on engagement nor how to improve this component of D...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Drink Less is a behavior change app to help higher-risk drinkers in the United Kingdom reduce their alcohol consumption. The app includes a daily notification asking users to "Please complete your drinks and mood diary," yet we did not understand the causal effect of the notification on engagement nor how to improve this component of D...
Preprint
Full-text available
Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) involves repeated, real-time sampling of health behaviours in context. We present the state-of-knowledge in EMA research focused on five key health behaviours (physical activity and sedentary behaviour, dietary behaviour, alcohol consumption, tobacco smoking, sexual health), summarising theoretical (e.g., psych...
Article
Full-text available
In this White Paper, we outline recommendations from the perspective of health psychology and behavioural science, addressing three research gaps: (1) What methods in the health psychology research toolkit can be best used for developing and evaluating digital health tools? (2) What are the most feasible strategies to reuse digital health tools acr...
Preprint
BACKGROUND Engagement with smartphone apps for smoking cessation tends to be low. Chatbots (ie, software that enables conversations with users) offer a promising means of increasing engagement. OBJECTIVE We aimed to explore smokers’ experiences with a quick-response chatbot ( Quit Coach ) implemented within a popular smoking cessation app and iden...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Several personality traits have been linked to addictive behaviours, including smoking and excessive drinking. We hypothesised that the combination of low conscientiousness, high extraversion and high neuroticism would be synergistically associated with smoking, excessive drinking and both behaviours combined. Methods: Respondents aged...
Article
Full-text available
Background: It is unclear whether smoking increases the risk of COVID-19 hospitalisation. We first examined the association of smoking status with hospitalisation for COVID-19 compared with hospitalisation for other respiratory viral infections a year previous. Second, we examined the concordance between smoking status recorded on the electronic he...
Article
Full-text available
This study investigated UK adults’ changes in cigarette smoking and vaping during the COVID-19 pandemic and factors associated with any changes. Data were from an online longitudinal study. A self-selected sample (n = 332) of 228 smokers and 155 vapers (51 participants were both smokers and vapers) completed 5 surveys between April 2020 and June 20...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Digital health devices, such as health and well-being smartphone apps, could offer an accessible and cost-effective way to deliver health and well-being interventions. A key component of the effectiveness of health and well-being apps is user engagement. However, engagement with health and well-being apps is typically poor. Previous st...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Digital interventions have the potential to reduce alcohol consumption, although evidence on the effectiveness of apps is lacking. Drink Less is a popular, evidence-informed app with good usability, putting it in a strong position to be improved upon prior to conducting a confirmatory evaluation. This paper describes the process of refi...
Article
Full-text available
Background: It is unclear whether smoking increases the risk of COVID-19 hospitalisation. We first examined the association of smoking status with hospitalisation for COVID-19 compared with hospitalisation for other respiratory viral infections a year previous. Second, we examined the concordance between smoking status recorded on the electronic he...
Article
Full-text available
Background Improving adherence to self-protective behaviours is a public health priority. We aimed to assess the potential effectiveness and ease of use of an online version of the Risk Acceptance Ladder (RAL) in promoting help-seeking for cigarette smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, insufficient physical activity, or low fruit and vegetable c...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction: Considerable observational evidence suggests that cancer online support groups reduce feelings of isolation, depression and anxiety, enhance coping and self-management, and lead to better informed patients. Other studies indicate that cancer online support groups can increase distress. Yet no studies theorise the complex, context-dep...
Article
Full-text available
Background and Aims Lapse risk when trying to stop or reduce harmful substance use is idiosyncratic, dynamic and multi-factorial. Just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs) aim to deliver tailored support at moments of need or opportunity. We aimed to synthesise evidence on decision points, tailoring variables, intervention options, decision rule...
Article
Full-text available
Background: It is unclear whether smoking increases the risk of COVID-19 hospitalisation. We first examined the association of smoking status with hospitalisation for COVID-19 compared with hospitalisation for other respiratory viral infections a year previous. Second, we examined the concordance between smoking status recorded on the electronic he...
Article
Full-text available
Aims: To estimate the association of smoking status with rates of i) infection, ii) hospitalisation, iii) disease severity in hospitalised patients, and iv) mortality from SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 disease. Design: Living rapid review of observational and experimental studies with random-effects hierarchical Bayesian meta-analyses. Published articles and...
Article
Full-text available
AIMS: To estimate the association of smoking status with rates of i) infection, ii) hospitalisation, iii) disease severity in hospitalised patients, and iv) mortality from SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 disease. DESIGN: Living rapid review of observational and experimental studies with random-effects hierarchical Bayesian meta-analyses. Published articles and...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) involves repeated, real-time assessments of phenomena (eg, cognitions, emotions, behaviours) over a period of time in naturalistic settings. EMA is increasingly used to study both within-person and between-person processes. We will review EMA studies investigating key health behaviours and synthesi...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Digital interventions have the potential to reduce alcohol consumption, although evidence on the effectiveness of apps is lacking. Drink Less is a popular, evidence-informed app with good usability, putting it in a strong position to be improved upon prior to conducting a confirmatory evaluation. This paper describes the process of refi...
Article
Full-text available
BACKGROUND: Digital interventions have the potential to reduce alcohol consumption, although evidence on the effectiveness of apps is lacking. Drink Less is a popular, evidence-informed app with good usability, putting it in a strong position to be improved upon prior to conducting a confirmatory evaluation. This paper describes the process of refi...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose: Increasing personal protective behaviours is critical for stopping the spread of respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2: We need evidence to inform how to achieve this. We aimed to synthesize evidence on interventions to increase six personal protective behaviours (e.g., hand hygiene, face mask use, maintaining physical distancing) to...
Article
Full-text available
Despite the positive health effect of physical activity, one third of the world’s population is estimated to be insufficiently active. Prior research has mainly investigated physical activity on an aggregate level over short periods of time, e.g., during 3 to 7 days at baseline and a few months later, post-intervention. To develop effective interve...
Article
Full-text available
Acceptability is a core concept in digital health. Available frameworks have not clearly articulated why and how researchers, practitioners and policy makers may wish to study the concept of acceptability. Here, we aim to discuss (i) the ways in which acceptability might differ from closely related concepts, including user engagement; (ii) the util...
Preprint
Full-text available
PURPOSE: Increasing personal protective behaviours is critical for stopping the spread of respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2: we need evidence to inform how to achieve this. We aimed to synthesise evidence on interventions to increase six personal protective behaviours (e.g. hand hygiene, face mask use) to limit the spread of respiratory vir...
Preprint
Full-text available
BACKGROUND Digital health media, such as health and wellbeing smartphone apps, could offer an accessible and cost-effective way to deliver health and wellbeing interventions. A key component of the effectiveness of these apps is user engagement. However, engagement with health and wellbeing apps is typically sub-optimal. Previous studies have ident...
Article
Full-text available
Background Digital health devices, such as health and well-being smartphone apps, could offer an accessible and cost-effective way to deliver health and well-being interventions. A key component of the effectiveness of health and well-being apps is user engagement. However, engagement with health and well-being apps is typically poor. Previous stud...
Article
Full-text available
Aims: To estimate the association of smoking status with rates of i) infection, ii) hospitalisation, iii) disease severity, and iv) mortality from SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 disease. Design: Living rapid review of observational and experimental studies with random-effects hierarchical Bayesian meta-analyses. Published articles and pre-prints were identifi...