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Designing Digital Health Technologies as Persuasive Technologies
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Designing Digital Health Technologies as Persuasive Technologies

A special issue of Information (ISSN 2078-2489). This special issue belongs to the section "Information Systems".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (28 May 2021) | Viewed by 11868

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Kiemute Oyibo

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of Public Health and Health Systems, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada
Interests: persuasive technology; personalization; human–computer interaction, user experience; eHealth
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. Plinio Morita

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of Public Health and Health Systems, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada
Interests: mHealth; wearable technology; internet of things; public health surveillance
Dr. Julita Vassileva

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada
Interests: behavior change; persuasive technology; personalization; privacy; trust

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Digital health technologies are information and communication systems, tools, and processes used for efficient and quality healthcare service delivery. They range from self-monitoring mobile applications (e.g., fitness applications) to contact tracing apps (e.g., exposure notification apps) used by individuals in home and public settings to track their health behaviors and exposures to communicable diseases, respectively. Moreover, in clinical settings, they range from electronic medical record (EMR)/electronic health record (EHR) systems used to improve communication of patient health information among caregivers and physicians to clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) used to assist healthcare providers in making informed decisions and implementing evidence-based clinical guidelines and interventions. Particularly, the COVID-19 pandemic has initiated an explosion of dedicated mobile health applications on the market, such as contact tracing apps, exposure notification apps, social distancing apps, symptom trackers, etc. However, the acceptance and adoption of such technologies, particularly contact tracing and exposure notification apps, have not been very encouraging, partly due to privacy concerns and other application and human-factor design issues. The poor uptake of these mobile applications limits their effectiveness, as research has shown that the more people use them the more likely they are to be effective in slowing down the spread of the coronavirus. In particular, most of the COVID-19 mobile applications on the market, just like most CDSSs, EHRs, and EMRs in clinical settings, have not been intentionally designed to motivate behavior change by incorporating persuasive features, which have the potential to increase their adoption and effectiveness. Incorporating persuasive features into digital health technologies such as contact tracing apps and consumer-facing EHR-integrated web portals has the potential to increase their adoption and promote their effectiveness among the target users. Hence, in this Special Issue, we focus on the intersection of digital health technologies and persuasive technology. The scope and topics of interest of the Special Issue include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Application of persuasive principles in the design of digital health technologies.
  • Frameworks and models for designing persuasive digital health technologies.
  • Frameworks, models, and tools for evaluating persuasive digital health technologies.
  • Tailoring and personalization of persuasive digital health technologies.
  • Evaluation of the effectiveness of persuasive digital health technologies.
  • Privacy and ethics on the persuasive design of digital health technologies.
  • Trust in mobile applications for contact tracing and exposure notification.
  • Case studies and examples of personalized digital health technologies.
  • Challenges and opportunities for personalizing contact tracing applications.
  • Comparisons in the adoption of pandemic-related applications in different regions and countries.

Authors of papers submitted to conferences or workshops should be aware that their final submitted manuscript must provide a minimum of 50% new content. The deadline for submission to this Special Issue is May 28, 2021.

Dr. Kiemute Oyibo
Dr. Plinio Morita
Dr. Julita Vassileva
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Information is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • persuasive technology
  • personalization
  • digital health, eHealth, mhealth, COVID-19 app
  • behavior change

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

24 pages, 3292 KiB  
Article
Relationship between Perceived UX Design Attributes and Persuasive Features: A Case Study of Fitness App
by Kiemute Oyibo and Julita Vassileva
Information 2021, 12(9), 365; https://doi.org/10.3390/info12090365 - 7 Sep 2021
Cited by 7 | Viewed by 4710
Abstract
Research shows that a well-designed user interface is more likely to be persuasive than a poorly designed one. However, there is a limited understanding of the relationship between user-experience (UX) design attributes and users’ receptiveness to the persuasive features of a persuasive technology [...] Read more.
Research shows that a well-designed user interface is more likely to be persuasive than a poorly designed one. However, there is a limited understanding of the relationship between user-experience (UX) design attributes and users’ receptiveness to the persuasive features of a persuasive technology aimed at motivating behavior change. To bridge this gap, we carried out an online case study among 228 participants from Canada and the United States to investigate the relationship between perceived UX design attributes and users’ receptiveness to persuasive features. The study serves as exploratory work by focusing on a single prototype (homepage of a fitness app); four commonly researched UX design attributes (perceived aesthetics, perceived usability, perceived credibility, and perceived usefulness); and six commonly employed persuasive features (Goal-Setting/Self-Monitoring, Reward, Cooperation, Competition, Social Comparison, and Social Learning) illustrated on storyboards. The results of the Partial Least Square Path Modeling show that perceived usefulness, followed by perceived aesthetics, has the strongest relationship with users’ receptiveness to the persuasive features of a fitness app. Specifically, perceived usefulness and perceived aesthetics have a significant relationship with users’ receptiveness to all but two of the six persuasive features, respectively, as well as with the overall perceived persuasiveness of the fitness app. These findings are supported by participants’ comments on the perceived UX design attributes of the fitness app and the persuasive features illustrated on the storyboards. However, perceived usability and perceived credibility have weak or non-significant relationships with users’ receptiveness to the six persuasive features. The findings suggest that designers should prioritize utilitarian benefits (perceived usefulness) and hedonic benefits (perceived aesthetics) over perceived usability and perceived credibility when designing fitness apps to support behavior change. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Designing Digital Health Technologies as Persuasive Technologies)
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18 pages, 1151 KiB  
Article
The Relationship between Perceived Health Message Motivation and Social Cognitive Beliefs in Persuasive Health Communication
by Kiemute Oyibo
Information 2021, 12(9), 350; https://doi.org/10.3390/info12090350 - 28 Aug 2021
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 5927
Abstract
People respond to different types of health messages in persuasive health communication aimed at motivating behavior change. Hence, in human factors design, there is a need to tailor health applications to different user groups rather than change the human characteristics and conditions. However, [...] Read more.
People respond to different types of health messages in persuasive health communication aimed at motivating behavior change. Hence, in human factors design, there is a need to tailor health applications to different user groups rather than change the human characteristics and conditions. However, in the domain of fitness app design, there is limited research on the relationship between users’ perceived motivation of health messages and their social–cognitive beliefs about exercise, and how this relationship is moderated by gender. Knowledge of the gender difference will help in tailoring fitness apps to the two main gender types. Hence, I conducted an empirical study to investigate the types of health messages that are most likely to motivate users and how these messages are related to outcome expectation, self-efficacy, and self-regulation beliefs in the context of exercise modeling. The results of the data analysis show that users are more motivated by illness- and death-related messages compared with obesity-, social stigma-, and financial cost-related messages. Moreover, illness- and death-related messages have a significant relationship with users’ social–cognitive beliefs about bodyweight exercise. These findings indicate that, in the fitness domain, illness- and death-related messages may be employed as a persuasive technique to motivate regular exercise. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Designing Digital Health Technologies as Persuasive Technologies)
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