Understanding Personalization for Health Behavior Change Applications: A Review and Future Directions

Health behavior change (HBC) applications hold much promise for promoting healthy lifestyles, such as enhancing physical activity (PA), diet, and sleep. Incorporating personalization strategies is seen as key to designing effective HBC applications. However, researchers and application designers lack knowledge about the different kinds of personalization strategies, how to implement them, and what strategies work. Thus, we reviewed prior empirical studies on personalization for HBC applications and developed a framework to synthesize the prior studies we identified and to provide an integrative view of the personalization strategies, their inputs, and outcomes. Our findings suggest that researchers have much potential to conduct design research that employs demographic and contextual characteristics for personalization and that examines personalization strategies that target HBC applications’ interface and channels. In terms of implementation and adoption, we call for researchers to examine unaddressed issues such as low adherence and contextual barriers for these applications. We also suggest that researchers need to systematically examine the effects of specific personalization strategies on their efficacy. Other than providing an integrative view of extant studies, our study contributes by outlining key directions for future research in this area

God-like robots : the semantic overlap between representation of divine and artificial entities

Artificial intelligence and robots may progressively take a more and more prominent place in our daily environment. Interestingly, in the study of how humans perceive these artificial entities, science has mainly taken an anthropocentric perspective (i.e., how distant from humans are these agents). Considering people’s fears and expectations from robots and artificial intelligence, they tend to be simultaneously afraid and allured to them, much as they would be to the conceptualisations related to the divine entities (e.g., gods). In two experiments, we investigated the proximity of representation between artificial entities (i.e., artificial intelligence and robots), divine entities and natural entities (i.e., humans and other animals) at both an explicit (Study 1) and an implicit level (Study 2). In the first study, participants evaluated these entities explicitly on positive and negative attitudes. Hierarchical clustering analysis showed that participants’ representation of artificial intelligence, robots and divine entities were similar, while the representation of humans tended to be associated with that of animals. In the second study, participants carried out a word/non-word decision task including religious semantic-related words and neutral words after the presentation of a masked prime referring to divine entities, artificial entities and natural entities (or a control prime). Results showed that after divine and artificial entity primes, participants were faster to identify religious words as words compared to neutral words arguing for a semantic activation. We conclude that people make sense of the new entities by relying on already familiar entities and in the case of artificial intelligence and robots, people appear to draw parallels to divine entities

An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

The effect of embodied agents within the user interface

The thesis explores the trend in recent years by HCI designers to create an interface which is increasingly more anthropomorphic in nature, due to advances in computer graphics and interface technologies. The thesis has researched the effects of one such manifestation of this anthropomorphic trend on the human user, which embodies the human persona, in the form of embodied agents. The thesis is anchored in the growing area of human-agent interaction studies; and how the agent's appearance in terms of their visual cues (i.e. gender, ethnicity, realism, and attractiveness levels), affects the human user interacting with these artificial entities. The aim of this thesis is to explore how the agents' visual appearance can elicit change in the user's perception and behaviour, in order to improve human-agent design, and the interaction experience for the user. The thesis extends HCI studies investigating the effect of embodied agents, by highlighting the effect of the attractiveness stereotype which can elicit various impressions, stereotypes and behavioural changes within the human user. The thesis results demonstrate that attractive agents were perceived and evaluated more positively, as well being more persuasive than the unattractive agents. Hence, the agents' attractiveness was the main visual cue which played a major role in affecting the participants' opinion and behaviour towards the agents. The thesis advances the current understanding of CASA, by providing evidence to suggest that although users may respond socially to agents; this human-agent experience is not always equal to human-human experience. The thesis concludes by stating that the CASA methodology and Media Equation require some modification and needs to be adapted when applied to human-agent interaction, and especially within the interaction-based context.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

THE INFLUENCE OF ONLINE REVIEWS ON SAUDI CONSUMERS’ TOURISM DESTINATION CHOICES

Online consumer reviews (OCRs) can be key aspects of how tourists choose a travel destination. OCRs are particularly important for experiential purchases such as tourism destinations, because consumers have difficulty assessing the quality of intangible products prior to consumption. OCRs can thus shape preconceptions or expectations about a destination for potential tourists, subsequently influencing visit intention. Social influence impacts adoption intention, but this relationship in the context of tourism OCRs and destination choice has largely been ignored, despite the fact that tourism often involves travel across different cultures. The aim of this research is to investigate the influence of OCRs posted on tourism websites, and to examine the impact of social influences on the OCR reader’s intention to visit a tourist destination. The research has a country-specific focus in that the study population is resident in Saudi Arabia (KSA). The study model, the Online Consumer Reviews Influence Model (OCRIM) expands the Information Adoption Model with two constructs from the Theory of Reasoned Action and four of Hofstede’s (1980) cultural dimensions. OCRIM explores the impact of OCR features in tourism websites, and of social influences on OCR readers’ visit intention. The proposed information adoption process comprises three constructs: perceived information usefulness, perceived information trust, and information adoption. Five factors are proposed to determine the information adoption process: website quality, review provider credibility, argument quality, information sidedness, and subjective norms. OCRIM was validated through PLS-SEM on a survey of 384 tourists resident in KSA. The findings of this thesis are that website quality, information sidedness, and subjective norms influence tourist visit intention, with subjective norms exerting the strongest influence. Additionally, OCR readers’ cultural values (particularly collectivism, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance) influence visit intention. Perceived information usefulness was found to influence visit intention indirectly, through perceived information trust and information adoption. These findings have both theoretical and practical implications: they validate this study’s extension of a well-established framework, and the results have provided empirical evidence for the direct impact of social influences on tourist visit intention. Understanding the characteristics of OCRs that influence tourist visit intention will enable marketers to develop more effective sales platforms online. Tourism managers and policy makers alike should pay close attention to OCRs in order to better understand tourist behavioural intention

We Give Them the Most Important Thing Possible. We Give Their Dreary Lives Excitement”: Toward a Theoretical Model of Narrative Parasocial Engagement

Video game narratives and characters are some of the most enjoyable and persuasive components of the video game industry. While narratives and character relationships within video games have been examined separately, there is no working model and little research attempting to bridge the connection between narratives and character relationships. This research combines Narrative Paradigm Theory and Parasocial Relationships to understand how narratives and character relationships influence each other in video game environments. This was done through rhetorical field methods, utilizing a focus group and narrative rhetorical analysis on the transcript of the focus group. Results provide a working model coined the Pyramid of Narrative Parasocial Engagement. This model explains how video game players can be rhetorically satisfied and thus persuaded through achieving different levels of video game engagement. The levels of the pyramid include Avatar Identification, Narrative Involvement, Parasocial Relationships, Community Engagement, and Rhetorical Satisfaction. A player must achieve the base level and work their way up the pyramid similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Results further indicate that the level a player achieves on the pyramid influences the level of narrative blending between their video game micro-narrative and their real-life grand narrative, and thus a higher influence to be persuaded in value, belief, or action to the video game’s persuasive goal. This research implies that the Uses and Gratifications model of using media to satisfy needs may not be fully realized as the working model argues players use video games to reach a real community to engage with rather than being content with the narrative and parasocial relationships the game provides. Future research should test the Pyramid of Narrative Parasocial Engagement using other methodologies

Human-Machine Communication: Complete Volume. Volume 2

This is the complete volume of HMC Volume 2