Better together: opportunities for technology in health coaching from the coach's perspective

Health coaching is an interpersonal process, where communication and the relation between the coach and the client are central aspects. Still, new technologies offer a variety of interesting opportunities, in both measurement as well as intervention. To understand the coaching process and to explore the possible added value of technology, we conducted semi-structured interviews with health coaches and performed a thematic analysis on the data. Based on the daily practice and the needs of the coaches, we extracted opportunities and requirements for technology. We found that humans can easily express empathy and are sensitive to evolving goals and underlying motives, whereas technology can consistently measure behavioral data and can predict effectiveness of interventions by learning from large datasets. We conclude that the strengths of humans and technology are complementary and map to different aspects of the coaching process.