Search

The experiment described in this paper addressed two main questions. Can a virtual coach motivate beginning athletes? Can a virtual coach influence beginning athletes exercise behavior? The results show that doing physical exercises is more enjoyable with a virtual coach than without, consequently increasing the intrinsic motivation. Also, the extrinsic motivation is increased by a virtual coach, which is indicated by higher external regulation. Finally, participants biked more in the optimal heart beat zone in the condition with the coach. Longitudinal research is needed to find out the long-term effect of a virtual coach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Persuasive technologies can be useful to modify behaviors related to energy usage. In this paper, we present the PowerHouse a computer game designed to influence behaviors associated with energy use and promote an energy-aware lifestyle among teenagers. This prototype game aims to influence a set of target activities in the home using several persuasive techniques. Employing the format of a reality TV show (docu soap), the game informs implicitly and explicitly about various energy-efficient actions. We discuss our overall game design and its advantages and disadvantages in relation to the methods we have employed in the game. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The motivationally positive property of technologies has both a functional and an attractiveness component. The first one concerns the use of interactive technology to encourage or discourage specific behaviours by controlling the conditions under which they occur. Riding a motorcycle for the excitement, is a good example of the second component. Gerontechnology, as a service of human health and well-being during development and aging, has been defined in 1991. After 15 years it is time to view the persuasiveness of current and future practices to focus our behaviour and attitude towards a lifespan with enlarged vitality and independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A theoretical framework for communication and persuasion technology is introduced, utilizing people's emotions and personality characteristics. It uses two unobtrusive psychophysiological measures to penetrate people's emotional space: heart rate variability and the variability of the fundamental frequency of the pitch of the voice. In addition, two experiments are described that validate these measures. Future systems can utilize such technology to sense people's emotions and adopt suitable persuasion strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines an approach for prospective health technologies: systems that inspire changes in midlife to prevent onset and progression of disease. Motivational hooks related to wellness, appearance and relationship satisfaction are aligned with long term disease risks and supported through dynamic feedback displays. Wireless sensor networks, inferencing, ambient displays and mobile interfaces are explored to carry biofeedback into everyday life. Several examples of display concepts - created to facilitate self-regulation of social engagement, weight, physical exertion and stress reactivity - illustrate this approach. Future work will explore mind-body relationships and extend from informational displays to experiential feedback. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The realization of the ambient intelligence (AmI) vision will have a profound impact on our everyday lives and society. AmI applied in contexts like homes or public spaces will not only affect individual users but influence entire groups of users. The question is how we can apply such technologies to persuade groups and individual users. Our approach is to design AmI environments by borrowing a concept which works very well in biological and social systems: Collective Intelligence (CI). The intelligence of a group surpasses the individual intelligences and leads to improved problem solving capabilities of individuals and groups. From nature we borrow examples of cues in the environment to stimulate goal directed collective intelligence (perCues). The application of perCues in AmI environments helps to persuade users to reach a common goal like decreasing environmental pollution. Adopting CI for AmI we blaze a trail for the design of persuasive AmI environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The keynote speaker for this conference, Dr. B.J. Fogg, defines persuasive technology as, "interactive computing systems designed to change people's attitudes and behaviors." [1]. Such changes find their origin in changes in people's motivation. The coaching possibilities of technology may be viewed as an embellishment of conditioning and behavior therapy. With respect to aging, most people want to live a long life—indeed as long as possible—but they don't want to grow old. Literally dozens of formal and informal surveys about the ambitions and desired activities of old people have been performed [2]. The results highlight the desire of older persons to maintain their accustomed way of life, maintain and identify new social contacts; and identify and develop new recreational, educational and artistic activities, some that replace or modify earlier ones associated with family and work. With this background in mind, we will discuss persuasive technology as coaching benefits in relation to the ambitions, activities and wisdom of people as they age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personal digital assistants (PDAs) can be used persuasively to change attitudes regarding medication taking, thereby facilitating adherence for older adults. A pillbox that integrates onto the body of the PDA was created as a place to store mid-day pills. Results from a lab and field experiment on older adults' perceptions and use of PDAs for medication minding are reported. In both the lab and field experiment, older adults were successfully trained to use PDA standard programs and a program for medication reminding. At the conclusion of the 3-month field experiment, a physical pill count yielded increased compliance with two-thirds of the participants missing 1 pill or less in the third month of the study. Implications for PDA training curricula, hardware design, and future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technicians from the Waag Society in Amsterdam developed an intelligent story- telling table, to be used in institutional care facilities for older persons. The core of the table is a video-equipment with installed 15 to 25 short video's (5 - 15 minutes) with historical stories from the years 1920 - 1950. Around the table there are 4 -6 TV-screens to look at the video's. The screens are located on a somewhat lower platform, in order to enable those who are sitting around the table to offer the best possibility to see the screen and each other and to exchange experiences from earlier life. The short video's are meant to start a process of exchange among those around the table by commenting on the video and telling their own life stories [1]. The involvement in the storytelling process was expected to promote social and emotional wellbeing and cognitive functioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the number and proportions of older people grow, those living in developed economies are increasingly likely to enjoy an active and healthy period of their life. During this time they are free to pursue old, and new, leisure interests and to travel around, both locally (often in towns, with the aid of concessionary, or free, travel passes) and to more distant places. Younger older people (up to age 75), people on higher incomes and people in better health are all more likely to move around more [1]. These trends are likely to increase in the future [2]. Meanwhile, technology developments in mobile telephony and geographic information systems are making it possible to locate the geographic position not only of vehicles and boats but also of people on foot [3]. These technical developments inspired the team working on this project to apply the sophisticated technology associated with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) , Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and Location Based Services (LBS) to address the pedestrian navigational needs of two groups of people who are frequently excluded from commercial design concerns. As well as older people, the research is addressing the needs of people with severe visual impairments. However, to date, the major thrust of fieldwork has focused on older people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This critical review of B.J. Fogg's book Persuasive Technology regards captology as an eclectic and formative work. It summarises two other reviewers' work and identifies several new strengths. It scrutinises Fogg's functional triad - computers functioning as tools, media and social actors - and some categorical changes are recommended. It investigates further Johnson's concerns about specific ethical omissions, nominating a new term, compusuasion, for the resultant but unintended, exogenous behaviour/attitude change effects of captological design. The review commences to more carefully define what constitutes persuasion and draws attention to the distinction between persuasion techniques in general and the behavioural changes that result from advocacy and education. The reviewer concludes that a fundamental ethic be that the designer's intent be exposed at the commencement of the user's engagement with the program and proffers the idea of persuasion resulting in a new conviction, induced by others, as a helpful definition of persuasion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heating is a significant expenditure of many households today but the actual power consumption of the heating devices are seldom recognized. To help people understand and reflect upon their domestic energy consumption, we have designed an electrical radiator that emits heat entirely from light bulbs. This appliance responds to temperature changes in the room via sensors. The idea was to combine the product semantics of lamps and radiators and direct focus on the latter neglected product category. We argue that by re-designing domestic appliances adding means to visualize energy consumption in engaging and interesting ways it is possible to make energy utilization less abstract and easier to comprehend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Vascular risk factors are often poorly managed. A multifactor approach with the aid of nurse practitioners (NPs) is more beneficial for achieving treatment goals of risk factors than achieved with usual care in patients with cardiovascular disease (CVD). Objective: In the SPAIN pilot-study, we want to implement and test a secure personalized website with additional treatment and coaching of a NP for risk factors in patients with CVD. Fifty patients are going to use the patient-specific website for six months. At study begin; realistic treatment goal(s) for elevated risk factors are made between patients and the NP. Patients can enter new measurements and are stimulated to keep regular e-mail contact. The NP personally replies during working days and gives regular but protocol driven feedback and support. Data will be collected on login attempts, amount of messages, risk factor levels before and after intervention and on beliefs. Determinants of changing behaviour are collected. Results: The results can be expected at the beginning of 2007. Conclusion: This pilot-study will give insight in feasibility and satisfaction of patients and NP in electronically treatment of risk factors. Also information on the course of risk factors will be available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present an example of how principles of motivation can be designed into educational software to support students in achieving their goals. The objective of our software was to develop a reading habit in children between 8 and 11 years of age by motivating them to improve their reading and writing skills. By designing activities that integrate Gardner's Multiple Intelligence theory to our software, we were able to motivate children to read while acknowledging individual differences in their learning process. The results on presenting this software to different groups of children from the city and rural environments show how we were able to motivate students to read through the software itself and the activities it proposes, in a way that was credible and connected to the real-world environment children lived in. Our results show the importance of integrating principles from Persuasion such as similarity, tailoring and credibility, together with theories such as Gardner's in educational software to achieve motivation to read and write in children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

E-therapy offers new means to support smokers during their attempt to quit. An embodied conversational agent can support people as a virtual coach on the internet. In this paper requirements are formulated for such a virtual coach and a global design is proposed. The requirements and the design are based on an extensive analysis of the practice of individual coaching of the Dutch organization STIVORO. In addition, the outcomes of a survey research measuring the acceptance of such a virtual coach by a potential user group are described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand what it means to design ‘persuasive technology', one probably needs to understand it in relation to design in general. Using examples from a variety of areas of design discourse, the first part of the paper presents the idea that design is inherently persuasive. Following a discussion of what this might imply to the identification of ‘persuasive design' as an emerging research area, the idea of objects as persuasive arguments in material form is presented. Suggesting that this notion could be used as basis for working with persuasion in design, the paper finally presents a practical example of how this might work in a design research project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marketing is essential to the survival of any product. Marketing a product is persuading people that the product can benefit them and meet their needs. Due to the diversity among people, a successful marketing strategy needs to adapt to individuals. Moreover, for certain products such as houses, the final decision tends to involve a group of people rather than an individual. In this paper, we propose an architecture for a system that produces an interactive video, which can adapt to a user or a group of users to promote a new product. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social software (SSW), nowadays increasingly widespread, has excellent potential for use as persuasive technology. What differentiates it from many other persuasive technology platforms is that it is inherently collective, making group dynamics a powerful factor in any SSW context of persuasion. Based on the psychology of groups, persuasion, and cross-cultural theory, we discuss affiliation, access, and participation as themes that are important in understanding SSW's use as a persuasive technology platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computational agents which make use of behaviour change models have the potential to help motivate people to change problematic behaviour. The importance of emotion simulation in behaviour change agents is discussed, along with an overview of a behaviour change model (the Transtheoretical Model [1]) that computational agents can make use of. Experiments that will investigate these areas further (within a nutritional domain) are then described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interest in designing games to convey persuasive messages concerning human well-being is growing, but presents a number of challenges. A significant problem comes in connecting the gameplay with the persuasive intent. We show how the gameplay structure of "avatar development" in popular-role playing games can be applied to the design of persuasive well-being games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a theory of a-rational persuasion in which we integrate emotional and non emotional strategies by arguing that they both imply reasoning and planning abilities in the two participants. We show some examples of texts from a corpus of persuasion messages in the healthy eating domain and propose a formalism to represent this knowledge. The final goal of our research is to simulate user-adapted persuasion dialogs about healthy eating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Persuasive technologies are increasingly ubiquitous, but the strategies they utilise largely originate in America. Consumer behaviour research shows us that certain persuasion strategies will be more effective on some cultures than others. We claim that the existing strategies will be less effective on non-American audiences than they are on American audiences, and we use information from interviews to show that there exists much scope to develop persuasive technologies from a collectivism-focused perspective. To illustrate the development of such a tool, we describe the design of a collectivism-focused financial planning tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing interest in persuasive games designed to positively influence players' well-being in areas such as physical and mental health, particularly in terms of education. Designing such "well-being games" is challenging because games themselves have not been sufficiently examined from this perspective. Examining the ways popular games convey messages persuasively is an important step in understanding design in this area. By studying the popular domain we can derive considerations for the design of games targeted at promoting human well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trust is considered to reduce uncertainty, and, therefore, is a prerequisite for people to engage in online transactions. Social presence potentially bridges the discrepancy between offline and online commerce in terms of face-to-face interaction. These concepts are often studied under the assumption that social presence in itself increases trust. In addition, these studies typically treat trust as a unidimensional concept. The proposed research targets the influence of social presence on trust by taking account of the multidimensional nature of the latter, as well as the attributions made to the salient person. It is expected that behavioural information, i.e., the expressed preference of a referent in a product choice task, will only affect social trust dimensions if the salience of this referent is increased by means of displaying an image. Data will be available at the time of the conference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the use of multimedia techniques and augmented reality tools to bring across the risks of global climate change. We look back on a series of experiments showing that vividness is a key factor in creating emotional risk responses and fostering attitude change through systematic information processing. However, the effects were modest even when vivid and concrete images and texts were used in combination with ominous sounds and music. The next step therefore is to explore and make use of the possibilities of multimedia techniques and augmented reality to provide people with a simulated risk experience. This paper concludes with a preview of this work, the focus of which is on the sense of presence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have shown the embedding of feedback dialogue in electronic appliances to be a promising energy conservation tool if the correct goal-feedback match is made. The present study is the first in a series planned to explore contextual effects as moderators of both the goal and the feedback. Tentative results are reported of a study where two different levels of alternative goals (related/unrelated) are primed and compared as to theory predictions of their motivational strength. Results suggest enhanced performance when an action-related goal is primed, however, more participants must be included before final conclusions can be drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major obstacle for promoting sustainable (e.g. ecological) consumer behaviors is people's negative attitude towards these. We tested the potential of a persuasion technique for improving these attitudes. We propose that cueing ecological behaviors people usually engage in, increases the accessibility of previously performed ecological behavior in the memory. As several theories suggest attitudes are inferred from previous behavior, we expected the increased ease of retrieval of ecological actions to result in more favorable attitudes towards these. Two studies confirmed this hypothesis, and further research will verify the success of the technique in promoting actual environmental behavior. Implications for setting up effective social marketing campaigns are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a field study we compared usage and acceptance of a mobile lifestyle coaching application with a traditional web application. The participants (N=40) documented health behaviour (activity and healthy nutrition) daily, trying to reach a defined goal. In addition, health questionnaires and social facilitation features were provided to enhance motivation. Acceptance of the system was high in both groups. The mobile application was perceived as being more attractive and fun to use. Analysis of the usage patterns showed significant differences between the mobile and the web-based application. There was no significant difference between the two groups in terms of task compliance and health behaviour. The effectiveness of mobility and social facilitation was confounded by other variables, e.g. gender and age. Initial motivation for lifestyle change was related to the overall compliance and goal achievement of the participant. Implications show ways to strengthen the persuasiveness of health applications on mobile devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computer-technology has led to the use of new principles of persuasion. These new principles constitute the unique working mechanisms of persuasion by means of computer. In the present study, three tailored messages that each contained one potential working mechanism - personalization, adaptation or feedback - were compared with a standard information condition. Two hundred and two students who smoked tobacco daily were randomly divided over four conditions. After the computer pre-test questionnaire, they read the information in their condition and filled in the immediate post-test. After 4 months, they were sent a follow-up questionnaire assessing their quitting activity. The data show that personalization (44.5%) and feedback (48.7%) but not adaptation (28.6%) led to significantly more quitting activity after 4 months than did the standard information (22.9%). Moreover, the effect of condition on quitting activity was mediated by individuals' evaluations of the extent to which the information took into account personal characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mood Induction Procedures (MIPs) are designed to induce emotional changes in experimental subjects in a controlled way, manipulating variables inside the laboratory. The induced mood should be an experimental analogue of the mood that would occur in a certain natural situation. Our team has developed an MIP using VR (VR-MIP) in order to induce different moods (sadness, happiness, anxiety and relaxation). The virtual environment is a park, which changes according to the mood to be induced. This work will present data about the efficacy of this procedure not only to induce a mood, but also to change after the mood is induced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this short paper we aim to give a brief introduction to persuasive technology, especially as it pertains to human well-being. We discuss a number of current research opportunities in areas of healthcare, environmental conservation, and education. We conclude by highlighting what we regard as the key research challenges that need to be addressed, focusing on context sensing and appropriate feedback, the need for longitudinal user studies, and ethical concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]