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Despite the increased usage and potential benefits of self-tracking technologies for pursuing healthy lifestyles, the relationship that users have with these personal devices has remained under-studied. The current paper presents a field study to explore the perceived role of self-tracking devices as social actors. Participants received a pedometer which they carried on their person for one day. Users’ access to numerical feedback and the feeling of being tracked were manipulated, and users were interviewed afterwards regarding their experiences and their perceived social relationship to the tracker. Results of a thematic analysis indicated that in general, the feeling of being tracked led to higher self-awareness regarding participants’ walking activity. In particular, having access to agent feedback gave rise to more frequent self-evaluative reports towards one’s performance as well as a closer relationship between the device and its user. The results extend the CASA (Computers As Social Actors) paradigm by demonstrating that the capturing (and feeding back) of data can make a device be perceived as a social actor and be described in relational terms, even in the absence of clear social cues.

Measurement technologies provide persuasive feedback to elicit motivation. However, little is known about whether different types of standards in progress feedback yield different motivational experiences. The current study investigates effects of mastery goals with either a self-based or a task-based standard on motivational experiences. An interactive dance game was developed to provide persuasive progress feedback in the form of a self- versus task-based standard. Participants played the game and reported their experiences with it. Results showed that participants in the self-based condition responded more in terms of Improvement and less in terms of Performance compared to those in the task-based condition. This finding implies that the type of standard in progress feedback can yield different motivational experiences.

Organic dirt on touch surfaces can be biological contaminants (microbes) or nutrients for those but is often invisible by the human eye causing challenges for evaluating the need for cleaning. Using hyperspectral scanning algorithm, touch surface cleanliness monitoring by optical imaging was studied in a real-life hospital environment. As the highlight, a human eye invisible stain from a dirty chair armrest was revealed manually with algorithms including threshold levels for intensity and clustering analysis with two excitation lights (green and red) and one bandpass filter (wavelength λ = 500 nm). The same result was confirmed by automatic k-means clustering analysis from the entire dirty data of visible light (red, green and blue) and filters 420 to 720 nm with 20 nm increments. Overall, the collected touch surface samples (N = 156) indicated the need for cleaning in some locations by the high culturable bacteria and adenosine triphosphate counts despite the lack of visible dirt. Examples of such locations were toilet door lock knobs and busy registration desk armchairs. Thus, the studied optical imaging system utilizing the safe visible light area shows a promising method for touch surface cleanliness evaluation in real-life environments.

Organic dirt on touch surfaces can be biological contaminants (microbes) or nutrients for those but is often invisible by the human eye causing challenges for evaluating the need for cleaning. Using hyperspectral scanning algorithm, touch surface cleanliness monitoring by optical imaging was studied in a real‐life hospital environment. As the highlight, a human eye invisible stain from a dirty chair armrest was revealed manually with algorithms including threshold levels for intensity and clustering analysis with two excitation lights (green and red) and one bandpass filter (wavelength λ = 500 nm). The same result was confirmed by automatic k‐means clustering analysis from the entire dirty data of visible light (red, green and blue) and filters 420 to 720 nm with 20 nm increments. Overall, the collected touch surface samples (N = 156) indicated the need for cleaning in some locations by the high culturable bacteria and adenosine triphosphate counts despite the lack of visible dirt. Examples of such locations were toilet door lock knobs and busy registration desk armchairs. Thus, the studied optical imaging system utilizing the safe visible light area shows a promising method for touch surface cleanliness evaluation in real‐life environments., Touch surface cleanliness monitoring by optical imaging was studied in a real‐life hospital environment using both manual and automatic hyperspectral scanning algorithms. As the highlight, a human eye invisible stain from a dirty chair armrest was revealed. Thus, the optical imaging system in the safe visible light area shows a promising method for touch surface cleanliness evaluation in real‐life environments.

Inspired by recent debates on drone technology and privacy protection, this research examines how negative consequences of drone usage can be mitigated by tailoring information about drone employment to the environmental context in which they are used. Additionally, this study seeks to clarify the role of information needs people have when confronted with drones in different settings. Using virtual reality environments and a dedicated virtual app providing opportunities for the public to learn more about drone usage, participants were confronted with drone surveillance at either a business area, at a park, or during an event, and received transparent information on drone usage or a neutral message proving no information on drone usage. Additionally, participants could obtain more information on drone usage by clicking on one or more information buttons in the app. Results show that, compared to an event, participants were less acceptant of drones in a business area and even less so at the park. Further analyses indicated that heightened transparency perceptions resulted in higher levels of trust, perceived control, and drone acceptance. Finally, participants particularly sought information on how drones are used in the business area and park environment, whereas a need for privacy information stood out in the park context. These findings testify to the importance of careful consideration of the environmental context and related communication needs people have when informing the public about drone usage.

Persuasive technology is a vibrant interdisciplinary research field, focusing on the study, design, development, and evaluation of information technologies aimed at influencing people’s attitudes or behaviors through open and transparent means. The International Conference on Persuasive Technology series brings together researchers, designers, practitioners and business people from various disciplines and a wide variety of application domains. The research community seeks to facilitate healthier lifestyles, make people feel or behave more safely, reduce consumption of renewable resources, among other notable goals, by, for instance, designing software applications, monitoring through sensor technologies, analyzing obtained data, and providing various types of coaching for users. The 14th International Conference on Persuasive Technology was hosted by the Department of Communication and Internet Studies at the Cyprus University of Technology in Limassol, Cyprus in April 2019, and organized in collaboration with the University of Oulu, Finland and the University of Wollongong, Australia. In previous years similar highly successful conferences were organized in Waterloo (Canada), Amsterdam (Netherlands), Salzburg (Austria), Chicago (United States), Padua (Italy), Sydney (Australia), Linköping (Sweden), Columbus (United States), Copenhagen (Denmark), Claremont (United States), Oulu (Finland), Palo Alto (United States), and Eindhoven (Netherlands). The conference addressed a wide variety of topics regarding the development of persuasive and behavior change support systems. This year papers were also solicited for two specific topics, namely Personal informatics and Gamification and gamified persuasive technologies.

Various nonverbal behaviors – often referred to as nonverbal immediacy - of both human and virtual teachers have been shown to play a crucial role in student learning. However, past literature provides limited evidence of the effect of a virtual agent’s vocalization, as a nonverbal immediacy cue, on learning outcomes. Even less is known about the effect of nonverbal immediacy on learning when used in conjunction with virtual behavioral modeling. Earlier research provides evidence that virtual behavioral modeling could be an effective instructional method to facilitate learning in multimedia learning environments. The current work investigated the effects of a virtual model that used stronger vs. weaker vocal nonverbal immediacy on affective learning and cognitive learning (both perceived and objective). The operationalization of the virtual model’s vocal nonverbal immediacy has been realized by manipulating the agent’s vocal parameters of pitch and speech rate. We predicted, that a virtual model with stronger vocal nonverbal immediacy (i.e., higher pitch and faster speech rate) would be more effective in influencing individuals’ learning outcomes, as compared to a virtual model with weaker vocal nonverbal immediacy (i.e., lower pitch and slower speech rate). In accordance with our hypotheses, results revealed that participants who received instructions from a virtual model that used stronger vocal nonverbal immediacy showed greater affective learning, and increased perceptions of learning. Support was also found for an effect on participants’ recall. Results and implications of the study’s findings are discussed.

Persuasive technologies use a variety of strategies and principles to encourage people to adopt and maintain beneficial behaviours and attitudes. In this paper we investigate the influence of Cialdini’s seven persuasive principles on people’s choices, actions and behaviour. In contrast to related work investigating perceived persusaion, this study analyses actual persuasion. We also investigate the impact of personality, age and gender on people’s susceptibility to different message types. Furthermore, we investigate if people’s susceptibility to different persuasive messages is consistent over time. The findings suggest that certain persuasive principles have a greater influence on a person’s actions than others, with Reciprocity and Liking being the most effective. Our results differ from work investigating perceived persuasiveness, suggesting that what people perceive to be more persuasive is not necessarily what will persuade them to perform an action. Moreover, the study showed that people’s susceptibility to different principles is dependent on their personality traits, and it remains constant with time. The findings from this study have implications for future work on personalising persuasive strategies and designing digital behaviour change interventions.

Children with exercise-induced asthma face several challenges in their daily life, which can improve by proper self-management practices. AIRplay combines biomedical sensing with gamified environments to improve physical conditioning and self-management of asthma among children aged 7 to 9 years old. The goal is to develop a proof-of-concept of coaching application that monitors physical activity of a young asthma patient, provide feedback based on this activity data, and integrates this application with an interactive playground to improve fitness. We discuss three areas where we can improve the current management of asthma among children based on literature and interviews with health care professionals. We present the coaching application and the interactive playground game, followed by a discussion where we discuss the current proof-of-concept using the Persuasive Design Model (PSD). We also foresee some challenges for future development and research.

This paper describes an investigation into the effectiveness of ArguMessage, a system that uses argumentation schemes and limited user input to semi-automatically generate persuasive messages encouraging behaviour change that follow specific argumentation patterns. We conducted user studies in the domains of healthy eating and email security to investigate its effectiveness. Our results show that ArguMessage in general supported users in generating messages based on the argumentation schemes. However, there were some issues in particular with copying the example messages, and some system improvements need to be made. Participants were generally satisfied with the messages produced, with the exception of those produced by two schemes (‘Argument from memory with goal’ and ‘Argument from values with goal’) which were removed after the first study.