Digital tailored strategies

Tailoring digital health communication (i.e., computer-tailoring) entails the process during which an individual assessment is matched with relevant pieces of information using software algorithms. Digital tailored strategies have several advantages over offline and generic forms of health communication, such as 24/7 accessibility to personalized information tailored to the individual user's context, a variety of possible delivery modes, and anonymity. Traditionally, computer-tailored health communication was most often tailored in content, i.e., in terms of what health information is communicated to its receiver. However, the effects of this content tailoring always remained – although positive – relatively small. Therefore, other ways of tailoring strategies have been applied and tested as well in the digital setting, such as message frame tailoring (adjustment of how a message is communicated, e.g., in terms of tone of voice or other message features) and mode tailoring (adjustment of the message delivery mode(s) based on users' learning styles and mode preferences). In this entry we discuss these different strategies for tailoring digital health communication and elaborate on some novel developments in the field as well: recommender systems and adaptive forms of tailoring.