One of the enduring puzzles in healthcare is consumer engagement. Everyone's downloading the latest health and wellness app or buying the newest fitness band or smartwatch, but few are using them beyond a couple months. And that's why providers are hesitant to jump on the bandwagon.

Armed with a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Partners HealthCare is ready to tackle that challenge.

RWJF is giving Boston-based Partners $468,000 to develop an "engagement engine" that convinces consumers to not only use health and activity trackers, but to keep on using them long after the novelty has worn off.

That's long been a pet project of Joseph Kvedar, Partners' vice president of connected health and head of the health system's Center for Connected Health. As the nation's healthcare system moves toward value-based outcomes, he has noted, it's important that providers find a means of keeping patients interested in their health management at all times, not just when they're sick.

But the common consumer is a fickle person, capable of telling his or her most private stories on Facebook or Twitter but hesitant to use a smartphone or mobile device to send health information to a doctor.

"Over the past 20 years I’ve seen technologies come and go, trends take hold and others fade away," Kvedar pointed out in a recent profile on mHealth News. "We are learning a great deal about how to empower patients to self-manage their health, and what to do with all of this patient-generated data. The common denominator, the one critical element we must get right, is how to ‘sell’ health to consumers and keep them coming back for more. I believe it’s got to be personal, motivational and ubiquitous."

That, officials say, is what makes this project so important.

“As an organization that is taking risk on a large proportion of its patients and moving towards value-based reimbursement, better understanding preventative care is extremely important,” Kamal Jethwani, MD, MPH, Partners' senior director of connected health innovation and principal investigator on the project, said in a press release. “Our patients are also consumers, and this engagement tool will allow us to interact with them in a new way, helping prevent the onset of chronic disease by enabling them to adopt healthy lifestyles.”

"Personalization has been a central theme in our work," Kvedar added in the release. "This grant allows us to significantly expand our capabilities in data analytics geared towards smart segmentation and personalization.”

Partners, through the Center for Connected Health, will use the grant money to develop and test an algorithm for using physical activity trackers in a sustained, personalized physical activity plan. Once the engagement engine is developed, they'll recruit a wide range of consumers through the online Wellocracy platform to study and validate the engine's effectiveness.

“To build a culture of health we will need tools that help people — no matter who they are or where they live — lead healthier lives," Debora Bae, the RWJF's senior program officer, said in the release. "Wearable sensors and tracking devices have the potential to help people exercise more, eat healthier and sleep better, and we need to learn more about how people engage with these devices to better understand how they can be maximized,”

“This project will explore ways to use these tools more effectively to increase and sustain physical activity over time,” Bae added of the grant, the first given by the RWJF to Partners.