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Persuasive Technology (PT) as a field of research provides tremendous opportunities for helping people improve their health and wellbeing. This paper highlights opportunities for empowering rural female population through a simple text-based persuasive intervention. The study was performed in June 2019 in a remotely located population in North-Eastern Pakistan. The target population were young mothers who were frequent users of mobile phones and able to read text messages. The study investigated whether simple Mobile-based Text Messages based on Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) could bring a positive behavior change in mothers such as breastfeeding, avoiding self-medication when a child is sick and having the child immunized regularly. For data collection, we opted to conduct Focus Group Discussions in order to gain richer insights. The findings revealed that a high majority of the participants found the text messages to be useful. More interestingly, just over the span of one month, these participants reported to have a natural change in their behaviors.

Data-driven technologies can persuade humans to optimize their behavior and context based on objective data. However, current data-driven technologies have limited persuasive powers, because of a misfit between technology, end-users and context. Neglecting end-users in the development process contributes to this misfit and to limited engagement with the to-be-developed technology. This threatens sustainable (long-term) implementation. Therefore, this paper demonstrates how a bottom-up participatory development approach can improve the persuasive design of data-driven technologies and simultaneously increase engagement of end-users to foster sustainable implementation. This is done by describing part of the development of an Audit & Feedback system for healthcare workers at a Dutch regional general hospital. The system intends to contribute to reducing antimicrobial resistance. The rationale for, questions asked at and results of a questionnaire and two focus groups are described.

The surveillance in public and private places, both physically and digitally, is increasing for different reasons. In this paper we intend to discuss surveillance and persuasive technology in an ethical perspective with an eye to its historical and cultural context. In section 1, we present some different tendencies of surveillance in society. In section 2, we elaborate on some important historical ideas on surveillance. In section 3, we consider the use of persuasive technology for surveillance purposes. In section 4, we discuss the development towards increasing surveillance in society, at work, in public places etc. In section 5, we draw up some ethical concerns on surveillance, and finally. In section 6, we discuss the question of a possible need for a public and democratic control of the use of surveillance technology.