Introduction to Health Behavior Change Support Systems Minitrack

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Persuasive Technology: Designing Mobile Health Triggers to Impact Health Behavior

Persuasive technology is an interactive computer technology designed to alter people’s attitudes or behaviors. Behavior change in mHealth solutions is often promoted through the use of specific messages called triggers. Fogg, in his work, identified three types of triggers: sparks, facilitators and signals. Each trigger is believed to have a different intent. Sparks provide motivation, facilitators support achievement of a goal, and signals provide simple reminders. While these triggers are theoretically distinct, specifications of the message development are absent in the literature. Here, we describe the challenges in implementing the different types of triggers into comparable but distinct messages. We describe the iterative development used to operationalize trigger messages into reliably distinct categories

Persuasive Social Support Features in Diabetes Self-Management mHealth Applications

Diabetes self-management is a challenging task and mobile health (mHealth) applications are one of the options that can assist and support the users in that process. The aim of this paper is to identify the social support features presented in these mHealth applications. Ten applications were selected and analysed based on the literature review and search of the phrase ‘The Best Diabetes Apps of 2018’ with the Google search engine. The results indicated that some social support features have been implemented in these applications however, its presence is sporadical. There is a need for further development of these apps, introducing and utilising features for social support such as social facilitation, cooperation, competition and recognition

Evaluating Persuasion in a Digital Learning Environment

The massification of higher education has produced cohorts of students with varying motivation and ability to meet their academic potential. Providing individualised support is not always feasible for instructors as class sizes continue to grow, so this research evaluates the persuasive design of a digital learning environment (DLE) to address the aforementioned issue. A system with persuasive features called Task-Test-Monitor (TTM) was used by students for a semester at an Australian university. At the conclusion of the semester, students were surveyed on their experience of using the system. Results showed students were strongly in favour of using such a system to help them study, with a significant portion of respondents reporting that the system influenced how they studied. Educators and system designers can benefit from these findings by applying persuasive design principles used in this research in their own pedagogy or system designs

Interpersonal Model of Online Textual Persuasion

As with other forms of human communication, text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC) media, such as email, instant messaging, and online texting, are often used as a means to persuade others. However, unlike most other media, which feature structural bias in their support for either interpersonal or broadcast communication modes, text- based CMC supports both modes. As a result, CMC text messages frequently have ambiguous origins. We argue that individuals respond to this ambiguity by categorizing these messages based on characteristics that distinguish interpersonal messages from broadcast messages, and receivers tend to comply to a greater extent with those messages that they perceive as interpersonal. Based on these arguments, we present a fundamentally new online textual persuasion model. In empirically testing the model in an online experiment that we assessed with structural equation modeling, we found that it exhibited strong explanatory power and additional utility in augmenting existing online persuasion models. The results offer important theoretical contributions to human-computer interaction research generally and provide practical specific insights for improving persuasive communication via text-based CMC

Persuasive systems design features in promoting medication management for consumers

Abstract Medication safety continues to be a growing concern in the healthcare industry. Providing medication information to consumers and supporting self- management would help to reduce medication errors and to increase medication adherence. This paper reviews the persuasive systems design features used in current medication management applications for consumers. A database search was conducted to identify relevant articles, which were then reviewed using the Persuasive Systems Design model as a framework for analysis. The results highlighted the applicability of these features for the medication management information systems available to consumers. Primary task support and Dialogue support categories were highly cited in the articles. System credibility support category was moderately cited and the Social support category was cited least in the reviewed articles. Tailoring, monitoring and reminder features have been considered more than the other features in previous studies