A theoretical and practical approach to a persuasive agent model for change behaviour in oral care and hygiene

There is an increased use of the persuasive agent in behaviour change interventions due to the agent‘s features of sociable, reactive, autonomy, and proactive. However, many interventions have been unsuccessful, particularly in the domain of oral care. The psychological reactance has been identified as one of the major reasons for these unsuccessful behaviour change interventions. This study proposes a formal persuasive agent model that leads to psychological reactance reduction in order to achieve an improved behaviour change intervention in oral care and hygiene. Agent-based simulation methodology is adopted for the development of the proposed model. Evaluation of the model was conducted in two phases that include verification and validation. The verification process involves simulation trace and stability analysis. On the other hand, the validation was carried out using user-centred approach by developing an agent-based application based on belief-desire-intention architecture. This study contributes an agent model which is made up of interrelated cognitive and behavioural factors. Furthermore, the simulation traces provide some insights on the interactions among the identified factors in order to comprehend their roles in behaviour change intervention. The simulation result showed that as time increases, the psychological reactance decreases towards zero. Similarly, the model validation result showed that the percentage of respondents‘ who experienced psychological reactance towards behaviour change in oral care and hygiene was reduced from 100 percent to 3 percent. The contribution made in this thesis would enable agent application and behaviour change intervention designers to make scientific reasoning and predictions. Likewise, it provides a guideline for software designers on the development of agent-based applications that may not have psychological reactance

Formal Framework to Support Organizational Design

Organizational design is an important topic in the literature on organizations. Usually the design principles are addressed informally in this literature. This paper makes a first attempt to formally introduce design operators to formalize the design steps in the process of designing organizations. These operators help an organization designer create an organization design from scratch as well as offer the possibility to revise existing designs of organizations. The operators offer both top-down refinements and bottom-up grouping options. Importantly, the operators can be combined into complex operators that can serve as patterns for larger steps in an organization design process. The usability of the design operators is demonstrated in a running example. The contribution of this paper provides a solid basis for the development of a software environment supporting interactive organization design processes. This is demonstrated by an implemented prototype example tool. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved