Ontological Review of Persuasion Support Systems (PSS) for Health Behavior Change through Physical Activity

Extensive Review of Persuasive System Design Categories and Principles: Behavioral Obesity Interventions

In this extensive review of behavioral digital obesity interventions, we reviewed randomized control trials aimed at weight loss or maintaining weight loss and identifying persuasive categories and principles that drive these interventions. The following databases were searched for long-term obesity interventions: Medline, PsycINFO, Academic Search Complete, CINAHL and Scopus. The inclusion criteria included the following search terms: obesity, overweight, weight reduction, weight loss, obesity management, and diet control. Additional criteria included randomized control trial, ≥ 6 months intervention, ≥ 100 participants and must include persuasive technology. Forty-six publications were in the final review. Primary task support was the most frequently utilized persuasive system design (PSD) category and self-monitoring was the most utilized PSD principle. Behavioral obesity interventions that utilized PSD with a behavior change theory more frequently produced statistically significant weight loss findings. Persuasive technology and PSD in digital health play a significant role in the management and improvement of obesity especially when aligned with behavior change theories. Understanding which PSD categories and principles work best for behavioral obesity interventions is critical and future interventions might be more effective if they were based on these specific PSD categories and principles.

Trends in Persuasive Technologies for Physical Activity and Sedentary Behavior: A Systematic Review

Persuasive technology (PT) is increasingly being used in the health and wellness domain to motivate and assist users with different lifestyles and behavioral health issues to change their attitudes and/or behaviors. There is growing evidence that PT can be effective at promoting behaviors in many health and wellness domains, including promoting physical activity (PA), healthy eating, and reducing sedentary behavior (SB). SB has been shown to pose a risk to overall health. Thus, reducing SB and increasing PA have been the focus of much PT work. This paper aims to provide a systematic review of PTs for promoting PA and reducing SB. Specifically, we answer some fundamental questions regarding its design and effectiveness based on an empirical review of the literature on PTs for promoting PA and discouraging SB, from 2003 to 2019 (170 papers). There are three main objectives: (1) to evaluate the effectiveness of PT in promoting PA and reducing SB; (2) to summarize and highlight trends in the outcomes such as system design, research methods, persuasive strategies employed and their implementaions, behavioral theories, and employed technological platforms; (3) to reveal the pitfalls and gaps in the present literature that can be leveraged and used to inform future research on designing PT for PA and SB.