Adaptive Persuasive Systems: A Study of Tailored Persuasive Text Messages to Reduce Snacking

Synergistic Effect of Motivation for the Elderly and Support for Going Out II: Measures to Induce Elderly Men to Go Out

BACKGROUND

The second demonstration experiment of supporting elderly people going out with the Choisoko system was conducted. The first study showed that for women, friends, shopping, convenience, and events are factors that have the potential to be effective motivational factors for encouraging these women to go out. On the other hand, these factors did not lead to any behavioral change in men. Since there are approximately 15 million men over the age of 65 in Japan, behavioral changes in the entire elderly population will not occur without guidance for elderly men to go out.

METHODS

Sixteen elderly men and forty-seven elderly women participated. Interestingly, men are far more passionate about games than women. Therefore, we hypothesized that a preference for games could be a hint as to how we might encourage older men to go out. Then, a second demonstration experiment was conducted, and we analyzed the relationship between six game preferences and the frequency of going out.

RESULTS

Among gaming preferences, men with gaming preferences such as Philanthropists, Achievers, and Free Spirits showed a tendency to go out.

CONCLUSIONS

These stimuli may have the potential to be factors that may encourage elderly men to go out.

Effects of a health versus hedonic mindset on daily-life snacking behaviour

BACKGROUND

In today's obesogenic environment high-caloric palatable foods are omnipresent, making it hard for many to reach and maintain a healthy body weight. This study investigates the effects of a health versus hedonic mindset on daily-life snacking behaviour. The hypothesis is that a health mindset leads to reduced snacking behaviour compared to a hedonic mindset. This effect is expected to be most pronounced with high dietary restraint and least pronounced with high trait self-control.

METHODS

For 3 weeks, degree of craving and amount of snacks that were craved and consumed were assessed four times a day, using smartphone Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA). A total of 111 female participants (body mass index range: 20-23.5) were randomly assigned to a 1-week health (n = 53) or hedonic (n = 58) mindset, occurring in week 2 of the EMA protocol. The mindset manipulations consisted of text messages, focusing either on the enjoyment of tasty food (hedonic) or on healthy living and eating (health).

RESULTS

contrary to our hypotheses, mindset did not affect snacking behaviour. Instead, degree of craving and intake of snacks reduced significantly over time, not moderated by mindset, dietary restraint (Restraint Scale) or trait self-control (Brief Self-Control Scale). Importantly, this was not due to reduced compliance. Possibly, the reduced craving and snacking behaviour were due to monitoring and/or socially desirable answering tendencies. Additional time point analyses showed that craving was strongest in the late afternoon (3:30-5:00 PM), and-across mindset conditions-degree of craving correlated negatively with trait self-control.

CONCLUSIONS

future studies could manipulate degree of monitoring and design individually tailored manipulations.

Feasibility of generating structured motivational messages for tailored physical activity coaching

Tailored motivational messages are helpful to motivate people in eHealth applications for increasing physical activity, but it is not sufficiently clear how such messages can be effectively generated in advance. We, therefore, put forward a theory-driven approach to generating tailored motivational messages for eHealth applications for behavior change, and we examine its feasibility by assessing how motivating the resulting messages are perceived. For this, we designed motivational messages with a specific structure that was based on an adaptation of an existing ontology for tailoring motivational messages in the context of physical activity. To obtain tailored messages, experts in health psychology and coaching successfully wrote messages with this structure for personas in scenarios that differed with regard to the persona's mood, self-efficacy, and progress. Based on an experiment in which 60 participants each rated the perceived motivational impact of six generic and six tailored messages based on scenarios, we found credible support for our hypothesis that messages tailored to mood, self-efficacy, and progress are perceived as more motivating. A thematic analysis of people's free-text responses about what they found motivating and demotivating about motivational messages further supports the use of tailored messages, as well as messages that are encouraging and empathetic, give feedback about people's progress, and mention the benefits of physical activity. To aid future work on motivational messages, we make our motivational messages and corresponding scenarios publicly available.

Investigation of personal variables, technology usage, vaccine-related variables, social media-specific epistemological beliefs, media literacy, social impact strategies variables affecting vaccine hesitancy beliefs in the Covid-19 pandemic

Aim

In this study, personal variables, technology use cases, vaccine-related variables, social media-specific epistemological beliefs, media literacy, and social influence strategies were examined as predictors of Covid-19 vaccination hesitancy (VH) beliefs.

Subject and methods

The prediction design research model is used to detect the predictors of the dependent variable. The study group consists of 378 participants. Five different scales were used together with the self-description form as a data collection tool.

Results

According to the results of the research, individuals who have positive perceptions about the safety of Covid-19 vaccines and who have received the Covid-19 vaccine have lower anti-vaccine beliefs. It is another situation that prevents the opposition to vaccination of those who research the source of information on social media. As a result, age, education and income level, social media usage experience, media literacy, and social influence strategies were not effective on the participants' anti-vaccine beliefs.

Conclusion

According to the findings of the study, positive perceptions about the safety of Covid-19 vaccines, being vaccinated against Covid-19, and researching a source of information on social media variables seem to be effective in laying the foundations for constructive interventions such as using anti-vaccine beliefs to guide, reduce or eliminate negative beliefs about vaccines.

MeetDurian: Can Location-Based Games be Used to Improve COVID-19 Hygiene Habits?

The COVID-19 problem has not gone away with the passing of the seasons. Although most countries have achieved remarkable results in fighting against epidemic diseases and controlling viruses, the general public is still far from understanding the new crown virus and lack imagination on its transmission law. Location-based games (LBGs) have been challenged during the on-going pandemic. No research has shown that LBGs can be used to help prevent COVID-19 infection. Therefore, we designed the game MeetDurian, which integrates entertainment, sports, and education. For investigating factors influencing intention to play the MeetDurian, we proposed some comparative evaluation. Data were gathered from participants who participated in capturing virtual durians and completed questionnaires about immersion into the game, workload assessment, user's emotions, learning outcomes, and personal hygiene. These results proved the acceptability and usability of the mobile game-based MeetDurian for preventing the infection and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mitigating Issues With/of/for True Personalization

A common but false perception persists about the level and type of personalization in the offerings of contemporary software, information systems, and services, known as Personalization Myopia: this involves a tendency for researchers to think that there are many more personalized services than there genuinely are, for the general audience to think that they are offered personalized services when they really are not, and for practitioners to have a mistaken idea of what makes a service personalized. And yet in an era, which mashes up large amounts of data, business analytics, deep learning, and persuasive systems, true personalization is a most promising approach for innovating and developing new types of systems and services—including support for behavior change. The potential of true personalization is elaborated in this article, especially with regards to persuasive software features and the oft-neglected fact that users change over time.

Personality-targeted persuasive gamified systems: exploring the impact of application domain on the effectiveness of behaviour change strategies

Persuasive gamified systems for health are interventions that promote behaviour change using various persuasive strategies. While research has shown that these strategies are effective at motivating behaviour change, there is little knowledge on whether and how the effectiveness of these strategies vary across multiple domains for people of distinct personality traits. To bridge this gap, we conducted a quantitative study with 568 participants to investigate (a) whether the effectiveness of the persuasive strategies implemented vary within each domain (b) whether the effectiveness of various strategies vary across two distinct domains, (c) how people belonging to different personality traits respond to these strategies, and (d) if people high in a personality trait would be influenced by a persuasive strategy within one domain and not in the other. Our results show that there are significant differences in the effectiveness of various strategies across domains and that people's personality plays a significant role in the perceived persuasiveness of different strategies both within and across distinct domains. The Reward strategy (which involves incentivizing users for achieving specific milestones towards the desired behaviour) and the Competition strategy (which involves allowing users to compete with each other to perform the desired behaviour) were effective for promoting healthy eating but not for smoking cessation for people high in Conscientiousness. We provide design suggestions for developing persuasive gamified interventions for health targeting distinct domains and tailored to individuals depending on their personalities.

Neural activity in self-related brain regions in response to tailored nutritional messages predicts dietary change

Overweight and obesity have become international public health problems, so there is an urgent need to implement effective interventions that prevent these concerning health issues. Designing personalized (tailored) dietary communications has become one of the most effective tools in reducing unhealthy eating behavior, when compared with one-size-fits-all messages (untailored). However, more research is required to gain a complete understanding of the underlying mechanisms by which tailored nutritional messages elicit reductions in unhealthy dietary behavior. To the best of our knowledge, our study may be the first to use neuroimaging, namely functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), aiming to evaluate the neural basis of tailored and untailored nutritional messages and assess how these neural responses predict unhealthy food intake reduction after a month receiving tailored nutritional messages. To that goal, 30 participants were scanned while reading tailored and untailored nutritional messages. Subsequently, for a month, they received tailored interventions encouraging healthy food intake. The neural findings reveal that when compared to untailored communications, tailored messages elicit brain networks associated with self-relevance, such as the precuneus, the middle temporal gyrus, the hippocampus, the inferior orbitofrontal cortex (OBC), the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dMPFC), and the angular gyrus. Interestingly, among these self-related brain areas, the dMPFC, OFC, angular gyrus, and hippocampus forecast reductions in unhealthy food intake after a one-month tailored intervention for the cessation of unhealthy eating. These results may offer implications for clinicians, practitioners, and/or policymakers who should implement substantial efforts in creating individualized campaigns focused on their target's perceived needs, goals, and drivers in relation to eating healthy to reduce overweight issues. This research therefore constitutes a step forward in showing a direct association between the neural responses to tailored nutritional messages and changes in real-life healthy eating behavior.

The Susceptibility to Persuasion Strategies Among Arab Muslims: The Role of Culture and Acculturation

This study is set forth to explore whether the susceptibility to persuasion—as articulated by Cialdini’s persuasion strategies—could vary with culture and acculturation. We examined individuals from the Arabic culture and their susceptibility to persuasion, according to the following strategies: reciprocity, commitment, liking, scarcity, consensus, and authority. The study involved 1,315 Arab Muslims between 18 and 60 years old (Mean = 34.65, SD = 9.16). The respondents were recruited from among residents of the Arab region (n = 507), immigrant Arabs in non-Arabic Muslim countries (n = 361), immigrant Arabs in East Asian countries (n = 85), and immigrant Arabs in Western countries (n = 362). Respondents completed an online Qualtrics survey. Controlling for socio-demographic variables (age, gender, income, education, and length of residence), our results indicated that susceptibility to the strategies differed significantly among Arab Muslims in the Arab region, with reciprocity being the highest and authority the lowest prevailing strategies. The same pattern of susceptibility emerged among immigrant Arab Muslims, regardless of their host country and the acculturation mode (integration, assimilation, separation, and marginalization) they endorse. These findings suggest that there is a consistent persuasion susceptibility pattern in the Arabic Muslim culture that does not seem to be modified by immigration and acculturation modes. Our findings are contrasted with the scarce research on cross-cultural differences in susceptibility to Cialdini’s persuasion strategies.

E-Commerce Shopping Motivation and the Influence of Persuasive Strategies

Persuasive strategies are used to influence the behavior or attitude of people without coercion and are commonly used in online systems such as e-commerce systems. However, in order to make persuasive strategies more effective, research suggests that they should be tailored to groups of similar individuals. Research in the traits that are effective in tailoring or personalizing persuasive strategies is an ongoing research area. In the present study, we propose the use of shoppers' online shopping motivation in tailoring six commonly used influence strategies: scarcity, authority, consensus, liking, reciprocity, and commitment. We aim to identify how these influence strategies can be tailored or personalized to e-commerce shoppers based on the online consumers' motivation when shopping. To achieve this, a research model was developed using Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) and tested by conducting a study of 226 online shoppers. The result of our structural model suggests that persuasive strategies can influence e-commerce shoppers in various ways depending on the shopping motivation of the shopper. Balanced buyers—the shoppers who typically plan their shopping ahead and are influenced by the desire to search for information online—have the strongest influence on commitment strategy and have insignificant effects on the other strategies. Convenience shoppers—those motivated to shop online because of convenience—have the strongest influence on scarcity, while store-oriented shoppers—those who are motivated by the need for social interaction and immediate possession of goods—have the strongest influence on consensus. Variety seekers—consumers who are motivated to shop online because of the opportunity to search through a variety of products and brands, on the other hand, have the strongest influence on authority.

Developing Effective Methods for Electronic Health Personalization: Protocol for Health Telescope, a Prospective Interventional Study

BACKGROUND

Existing evaluations of the effects of mobile apps to encourage physical activity have been criticized owing to their common lack of external validity, their short duration, and their inability to explain the drivers of the observed effects. This protocol describes the setup of Health Telescope, a longitudinal panel study in which the long-term effects of mobile electronic health (eHealth) apps are investigated. By setting up Health Telescope, we aim to (1) understand more about the long-term use of eHealth apps in an externally valid setting, (2) understand the relationships between short-term and long-term outcomes of the usage of eHealth apps, and (3) test different ways in which eHealth app allocation can be personalized.

OBJECTIVE

The objectives of this paper are to (1) demonstrate and motivate the validity of the many choices that we made in setting up an intensive longitudinal study, (2) provide a resource for researchers interested in using data generated by our study, and (3) act as a guideline for researchers interested in setting up their own longitudinal data collection using wearable devices. For the third objective, we explicitly discuss the General Data Protection Regulation and ethical requirements that need to be addressed.

METHODS

In this 4-month study, a group of approximately 450 participants will have their daily step count measured and will be asked daily about their mood using experience sampling. Once per month, participants will receive an intervention containing a recommendation to download an app that focuses on increasing physical activity. The mechanism for assigning recommendations to participants will be personalized over time, using contextual data obtained from previous interventions.

RESULTS

The data collection software has been developed, and all the legal and ethical checks are in place. Recruitment will start in Q4 of 2020. The initial results will be published in 2021.

CONCLUSIONS

The aim of Health Telescope is to investigate how different individuals respond to different ways of being encouraged to increase their physical activity. In this paper, we detail the setup, methods, and analysis plan that will enable us to reach this aim.

INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID)

PRR1-10.2196/16471.

Building a Persuasive Virtual Dietitian

This paper describes the Multimedia Application for Diet Management (MADiMan), a system that supports users in managing their diets while admitting diet transgressions. MADiMan consists of a numerical reasoner that takes into account users’ dietary constraints and automatically adapts the users’ diet, and of a natural language generation (NLG) system that automatically creates textual messages for explaining the results provided by the reasoner with the aim of persuading users to stick to a healthy diet. In the first part of the paper, we introduce the MADiMan system and, in particular, the basic mechanisms related to reasoning, data interpretation and content selection for a numeric data-to-text NLG system. We also discuss a number of factors influencing the design of the textual messages produced. In particular, we describe in detail the design of the sentence-aggregation procedure, which determines the compactness of the final message by applying two aggregation strategies. In the second part of the paper, we present the app that we developed, CheckYourMeal!, and the results of two human-based quantitative evaluations of the NLG module conducted using CheckYourMeal! in a simulation. The first evaluation, conducted with twenty users, ascertained both the perceived usefulness of graphics/text and the appeal, easiness and persuasiveness of the textual messages. The second evaluation, conducted with thirty-nine users, ascertained their persuasive power. The evaluations were based on the analysis of questionnaires and of logged data of users’ behaviour. Both evaluations showed significant results.

Exploring gamified persuasive system design for energy saving

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explore user-centered design possibilities at the intersection of gamification and persuasive technology to foster energy saving behavior.

Design/methodology/approach

We performed a large-scale empirical study of 480 participants and analyzed how different HEXAD gamification user types perceive selected persuasive strategies embedded in an energy saving prototype. Furthermore, we investigated the role of existing energy saving behaviors (pro-environmental behavior scale–e.g. regularly turning the lights off) and their effect on the perceived persuasiveness of the proposed persuasive strategies, which may has an impact on the overall design process. Furthermore, we applied partial least squares path modeling and conducted a one-way and repeated measure ANOVA.

Findings

Results show that user types play an important role in the design of persuasive systems for energy saving. For instance, people with a high tendency toward the Socializer user type were motivated by almost all of the employed persuasive strategies, whereas Philanthropists and Players only to a limited number of strategies. Furthermore, our study reveals that existing behaviors like the individual level of energy conservation influences the perceived persuasiveness of certain strategies and therefore should be considered in the design of such applications.

Research limitations/implications

Using storyboards to obtain feedback about the perceived persuasiveness of employed strategies has limitations compared to the actual use of a functional prototype. However, to offset that limitation the mock-ups used in the storyboard reflected the actual designs for a real-world prototype.

Originality

This is the first study that explores how HEXAD gamification user types can be used to inform the design of persuasive applications for energy saving (RQ1). Furthermore, and in particular, this study draws on the challenges when using user types within gamified persuasive systems by highlighting the impact and the importance of considering existing energy saving behaviors (RQ2), which has not been addressed so far.

Self-Persuasion Increases Healthy Eating Intention Depending on Cultural Background

Unhealthy eating behavior has become a global health risk and thus needs to be influenced. Previous research has found that self-persuasion is more effective than direct persuasion in changing attitudes and behavioral intentions, but the influence of the cultural backgrounds of those being persuaded remains unclear. We conducted two studies to investigate the effectiveness of self-persuasion and direct persuasion techniques in promoting healthy eating intention among different ethnicities in the Netherlands. Native Dutch, Moroccan–Dutch, and Turkish–Dutch participated both online and offline. Participants saw a poster with either a self-persuasion message (“Why would you choose healthier food?”) or a direct persuasion message (“Choose healthier food!”), and were then asked to report their intention to eat healthily in the upcoming month. Significant cultural differences were found between native Dutch and Moroccan–Dutch in Study 1, and between the native Dutch and Turkish-Dutch who participated offline in Study 2. Accordingly, cultural background was found to moderate the relationship between persuasion and healthy eating intention among these groups. These results provided preliminary evidence for the moderation effect of persuasion on healthy eating intention: Self-persuasion appears to be more effective for people with an individualistic background, and direct persuasion appears to be more effective for people with a collectivistic background.

Persuasive Features that Drive the Adoption of a Fitness Application and the Moderating Effect of Age and Gender

Fitness apps equipped with various persuasive features have become popular worldwide due to the physical inactivity crisis. However, there is a limited understanding of the most important persuasive features that drive their adoption and the moderating effect of age and gender. To bridge this gap, we designed storyboards illustrating six of the commonly employed persuasive strategies in persuasive health applications: Goal-Setting/Self-Monitoring, Reward, Social Learning, Social Comparison, Competition and Cooperation. We conducted an empirical study in which we asked the participants to evaluate their receptiveness to the six persuasive features and their intention to use a fitness app that features them. The result of our Partial Least Square Path Modeling (PLSPM) shows that, overall, Goal-Setting/Self-Monitoring is the strongest predictor of the intention to use a fitness app, followed by Reward and Competition, both of which are in second place. However, Social Learning and Social Comparison turn out to be non-predictors of intention to use. Based on these findings, we recommend that a minimally viable (one-size-fits-all) fitness app, in a personal setting, should support a Goal-Setting/Self-Monitoring feature, coupled with a Reward feature, to increase its appeal to a wide audience. Moreover, in a social setting, it should support a Competition feature to increase its appeal to a wide audience. We discuss these findings and the gender and age differences in the relationships between users’ receptiveness to the six persuasive features and their intention to use a fitness app that support them.

Stepwise Noise Elimination for Better Motivational and Advisory Texts Classification

There is little research into designing artificial motivational agents. The end-goal of our studies is therefore to create a dialogue system that would motivate users to do their everyday tasks using natural language. In this paper, we present a method of distinguishing texts containing motivational advice from regular texts to sort out noise in training data for our dialogue system. We implemented a novel method of chaining two shallow networks together by utilizing the output results of the first network to determine the input for the second one. We achieved F-score of 0.94 and 0.97 with our proposed method. The contributions of this paper are threefold: first, we successfully identified 14 hand-crafted features that make a text motivational/advisory. Secondly, we were able to create a classifying algorithm that distinguishes motivational/advisory texts from regular ones. Finally, our proposed method can be applied to other text classification tasks.

Manipulation and Malicious Personalization: Exploring the Self-Disclosure Biases Exploited by Deceptive Attackers on Social Media

In the real world, the disclosure of private information to others often occurs after a trustworthy relationship has been established. Conversely, users of Social Network Sites (SNSs) like Facebook or Instagram often disclose large amounts of personal information prematurely to individuals which are not necessarily trustworthy. Such a low privacy-preserving behavior is often exploited by deceptive attackers with harmful intentions. Basically, deceivers approach their victims in online communities using incentives that motivate them to share their private information, and ultimately, their credentials. Since motivations, such as financial or social gain vary from individual to individual, deceivers must wisely choose their incentive strategy to mislead the users. Consequently, attacks are crafted to each victim based on their particular information-sharing motivations. This work analyses, through an online survey, those motivations and cognitive biases which are frequently exploited by deceptive attackers in SNSs. We propose thereafter some countermeasures for each of these biases to provide personalized privacy protection against deceivers.

Can Message-Tailoring Based on Regulatory Fit Theory Improve the Efficacy of Persuasive Physical Activity Systems?

Background: Many behaviour-change technologies have been designed to help people with a sedentary lifestyle to become more physically active. However, challenges exist in designing systems that work effectively. One of the key challenges is that many of those technologies do not account for differences in individuals’ psychological characteristics. To address that problem, tailoring the communication between a system and its users has been proposed and examined. Although in the research related to public health education, message tailoring has been studied extensively as a technique to communicate health information and to educate people, its use in the design of behaviour-change technologies has not been adequately investigated. Objective: The goal of this study was to explore the impact of message tailoring, when tailoring was grounded in Higgins’ Regulatory Fit Theory, and messages were constructed to promote physical activity. Method: An email intervention was designed and developed that sent participants daily health messages for 14 consecutive days. There were three categories of messages: reminders, promotion-, and prevention-messages. The effect of the messages on behaviour was compared between those who received messages that fitted their self-regulatory orientation, versus those who received non-fitted messages. Results: Participants who received promotion- or prevention-messages walked for longer periods of time, compared to those who received reminders in the control group. When comparing the first two groups, promotion-message-recipients on average walked more than those who received prevention-messages. In other words, promotion messages acted more persuasively than prevention-messages and reminders. Contrary to our hypothesis, those individuals who received messages that fitted their self-regulatory orientation did not walk more than those who received non-fitted messages. Conclusions: The efficacy of Higgins’ Regulatory Fit Theory in the design of tailored health messages was examined. This study did not find support for the use of that theory in guiding the design of persuasive health messages that promote physical activity. Therefore, more research is necessary to investigate the effectiveness of tailoring strategies.

Investigation of the Moderating Effect of Culture on Users’ Susceptibility to Persuasive Features in Fitness Applications

Persuasive technologies have been identified as a potential motivational tool to tackle the rising problem of physical inactivity worldwide, with research showing they are more likely to be successful if tailored to the target audience. However, in the physical activity domain, there is limited research on how culture moderates users’ susceptibility to the various persuasive features employed in mobile health applications aimed to motivate behavior change. To bridge this gap, we conducted an empirical study among 256 participants from collectivist (n = 67) and individualist (n = 189) cultures to determine their culture-specific persuasion profiles with respect to six persuasive features commonly employed in fitness applications on the market. The persuasive features include two personal features (goal-setting/self-monitoring and reward) and four social features (competition, cooperation, social learning and social comparison). We based our study on the rating of storyboards (on which each of the six persuasive features is illustrated) and the ranking of the six persuasive features in terms of perceived persuasiveness. The results of our analysis showed that users from individualist and collectivist cultures significantly differ in their persuasion profiles. Based on our rating measure, collectivist users are more likely to be susceptible to all six persuasive features (personal and social) than individualist users, who are only likely to be susceptible to personal features. However, based on our ranking measure, individualist users are more likely to be susceptible to personal features (goal-setting/self-monitoring and reward) than collectivist users. In contrast, collectivist users are more likely to be susceptible to social features (cooperation and social learning) than individualist users. Based on these findings, we provide culture-specific persuasive technology design guidelines. Our study is the first to uncover the moderating effect of culture on users’ susceptibility to commonly employed persuasive features in fitness applications.

When Personalization Is Not an Option: An In-The-Wild Study on Persuasive News Recommendation

Aiming at granting wide access to their contents, online information providers often choose not to have registered users, and therefore must give up personalization. In this paper, we focus on the case of non-personalized news recommender systems, and explore persuasive techniques that can, nonetheless, be used to enhance recommendation presentation, with the aim of capturing the user’s interest on suggested items leveraging the way news is perceived. We present the results of two evaluations “in the wild”, carried out in the context of a real online magazine and based on data from 16,134 and 20,933 user sessions, respectively, where we empirically assessed the effectiveness of persuasion strategies which exploit logical fallacies and other techniques. Logical fallacies are inferential schemes known since antiquity that, even if formally invalid, appear as plausible and are therefore psychologically persuasive. In particular, our evaluations allowed us to compare three persuasive scenarios based on the Argumentum Ad Populum fallacy, on a modified version of the Argumentum ad Populum fallacy (Group-Ad Populum), and on no fallacy (neutral condition), respectively. Moreover, we studied the effects of the Accent Fallacy (in its visual variant), and of positive vs. negative Framing.

A methodology for creating and validating psychological stories for conveying and measuring psychological traits

Personality impacts all areas of our lives; it governs who we are and how we react to life's challenges. Personalized systems that adapt to end users should take into account the user's personality to perform well. Several methodologies (e.g. User-as-Wizard, indirect studies) that use personality adaptation require first for personality to be conveyed to the participant; this has few validated approaches. Furthermore, measuring personality is often time consuming, prone to response bias (e.g. using questionnaires) or data intensive (e.g. using behaviour or text mining). This paper presents a methodology for creating and validating stories to convey psychological traits and for using such stories with a personality slider scale to measure these traits. We present the validation of the scale and evaluate its reliability. To evidence the validity of the methodology, we outline studies where the stories and scale have been effectively applied (in recommender systems, intelligent tutoring systems, and persuasive systems).

Does SMS-Support Make a Difference? Effectiveness of a Two-Week Online-Training to Overcome Procrastination. A Randomized Controlled Trial

The primary purpose of this randomized controlled trial (RCT) was to evaluate the efficacy of an unguided, 2-week internet-based training program to overcome procrastination, called ON.TOP. Because adherence is a typical problem among individuals who tend to procrastinate, especially with internet-based interventions, the secondary purpose of the present study was to investigate whether adding SMS support increases subjects’ frequency of engagement in training. In a three-armed RCT (N = 161), the effects of the intervention alone and intervention with daily SMS-support were compared to a waiting list control condition in a sample of students. The primary outcome of interest was procrastination. The secondary outcome of interest was the extent of training behavior. Baseline (T0), immediate post-treatment (T1) and 8-week post-treatment (T2) assessments were conducted. Results indicated that procrastination decreased significantly only with intervention group with daily SMS support, relative to control. Moreover, incorporating SMS support also may enhance extent of training behavior.

Socially-driven persuasive health intervention design: Competition, social comparison, and cooperation

Persuasive technologies are tools for motivating behaviour change using persuasive strategies. socially-driven persuasive technologies employ three common socially-oriented persuasive strategies in many health domains: competition, social comparison, and cooperation. Research has shown the possibilities for socially-driven persuasive interventions to backfire by demotivating behaviour, but we lack knowledge about how the interventions could motivate or demotivate behaviours. To close this gap, we studied 1898 participants, specifically Socially-oriented strategies and their comparative effectiveness in socially-driven persuasive health interventions that motivate healthy behaviour change. The results of a thematic analysis of 278 pages of qualitative data reveal important strengths and weaknesses of the individual socially-oriented strategies that could facilitate or hinder their effectiveness at motivating behaviour change. These include their tendency to simplify behaviours and make them fun, challenge people and make them accountable, give a sense of accomplishment and their tendency to jeopardize user's privacy and relationships, creates unnecessary tension, and reduce self-confidence and self-esteem, and provoke a health disorder and body shaming, respectively. We contribute to the health informatics community by developing 15 design guidelines for operationalizing the strategies in persuasive health intervention to amplify their strengths and overcome their weaknesses.

Technology-Based Innovations to Foster Personalized Healthy Lifestyles and Well-Being: A Targeted Review

BACKGROUND

New community-based arrangements and novel technologies can empower individuals to be active participants in their health maintenance, enabling people to control and self-regulate their health and wellness and make better health- and lifestyle-related decisions. Mobile sensing technology and health systems responsive to individual profiles combined with cloud computing can expand innovation for new types of interoperable services that are consumer-oriented and community-based. This could fuel a paradigm shift in the way health care can be, or should be, provided and received, while lessening the burden on exhausted health and social care systems.

OBJECTIVE

Our goal is to identify and discuss the main scientific and engineering challenges that need to be successfully addressed in delivering state-of-the-art, ubiquitous eHealth and mHealth services, including citizen-centered wellness management services, and reposition their role and potential within a broader context of diverse sociotechnical drivers, agents, and stakeholders.

METHODS

We review the state-of-the-art relevant to the development and implementation of eHealth and mHealth services in critical domains. We identify and discuss scientific, engineering, and implementation-related challenges that need to be overcome to move research, development, and the market forward.

RESULTS

Several important advances have been identified in the fields of systems for personalized health monitoring, such as smartphone platforms and intelligent ubiquitous services. Sensors embedded in smartphones and clothes are making the unobtrusive recognition of physical activity, behavior, and lifestyle possible, and thus the deployment of platforms for health assistance and citizen empowerment. Similarly, significant advances are observed in the domain of infrastructure supporting services. Still, many technical problems remain to be solved, combined with no less challenging issues related to security, privacy, trust, and organizational dynamics.

CONCLUSIONS

Delivering innovative ubiquitous eHealth and mHealth services, including citizen-centered wellness and lifestyle management services, goes well beyond the development of technical solutions. For the large-scale information and communication technology-supported adoption of healthier lifestyles to take place, crucial innovations are needed in the process of making and deploying usable empowering end-user services that are trusted and user-acceptable. Such innovations require multidomain, multilevel, transdisciplinary work, grounded in theory but driven by citizens' and health care professionals' needs, expectations, and capabilities and matched by business ability to bring innovation to the market.

Persuasive technology for health and wellness: State-of-the-art and emerging trends

The evolving field of persuasive and behavior change technology is increasingly targeted at influencing behavior in the area of health and wellness. This paper provides an empirical review of 16 years (85 papers) of literature on persuasive technology for health and wellness to: (1.) answer important questions regarding the effectiveness of persuasive technology for health and wellness, (2.) summarize and highlight trends in the technology design, research methods, motivational strategies, theories, and health behaviors targeted by research to date, (3.) uncover pitfalls of existing persuasive technological interventions for health and wellness, and (4.) suggest directions for future research.

How to Increase Reach and Adherence of Web-Based Interventions: A Design Research Viewpoint

Nowadays, technology is increasingly used to increase people's well-being. For example, many mobile and Web-based apps have been developed that can support people to become mentally fit or to manage their daily diet. However, analyses of current Web-based interventions show that many systems are only used by a specific group of users (eg, women, highly educated), and that even they often do not persist and drop out as the intervention unfolds. In this paper, we assess the impact of design features of Web-based interventions on reach and adherence and conclude that the power that design can have has not been used to its full potential. We propose looking at design research as a source of inspiration for new (to the field) design approaches. The paper goes on to specify and discuss three of these approaches: personalization, ambient information, and use of metaphors. Central to our viewpoint is the role of positive affect triggered by well-designed persuasive features to boost adherence and well-being. Finally, we discuss the future of persuasive eHealth interventions and suggest avenues for follow-up research.

Rating Bias and Preference Acquisition

Personalized systems and recommender systems exploit implicitly and explicitly provided user information to address the needs and requirements of those using their services. User preference information, often in the form of interaction logs and ratings data, is used to identify similar users, whose opinions are leveraged to inform recommendations or to filter information. In this work we explore a different dimension of information trends in user bias and reasoning learned from ratings provided by users to a recommender system. Our work examines the characteristics of a dataset of 100,000 user ratings on a corpus of recipes, which illustrates stable user bias towards certain features of the recipes (cuisine type, key ingredient, and complexity). We exploit this knowledge to design and evaluate a personalized rating acquisition tool based on active learning, which leverages user biases in order to obtain ratings bearing high-value information and to reduce prediction errors with new users.