Review · 2026
Just-in-Time Adaptive Interventions: Where Are We Now and What Is Next?
Nahum-Shani I, Murphy SA
What it found
Reviews where in-the-moment support stands and what is missing. Three problems stand out: people often cannot engage with support at the very moment they need it most, engagement with digital interventions is generally low, and almost no work uses the people around a person.
Where the evidence stops
A conceptual review. It sets out challenges and directions; it does not give thresholds or effect sizes.
How it shapes Pursue
Pursue
Keeps Pursue honest about the gap between needing help and being able to use it, and about why low engagement is the default, not the exception.
A design input, not evidence that Pursue works.
Cited in
- 01Do reminder apps change what people do, or just how often they open the app?Often only the second. In a six-month University of Michigan trial with 287 adults with high blood pressure (Golbus et al., 2026), notifications made people use the app more but did not raise steps in the next hour or improve food choices the next day. Opening an app is engagement, not benefit.Engagement is not benefit
- 02When is it better for an AI assistant to say nothing?Whenever speaking would cost more attention than it gives back: when the person can't take it in, the evidence is thin, or nothing needs to change. The 2018 framework for just-in-time support (Nahum-Shani et al.) counts giving nothing as a designed option, and declining uncertain cases makes a system's other answers more reliable (Geifman and El-Yaniv, 2017).Timing and receptivity