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.

Internet forums and public social media, such as online healthcare forums, provide a convenient channel for users (people/patients) concerned about health issues to discuss and share information with each other. In late December 2019, an outbreak of a novel coronavirus (infection from which results in the disease named COVID-19) was reported, and, due to the rapid spread of the virus in other parts of the world, the World Health Organization declared a state of emergency. In this paper, we used automated extraction of COVID-19—related discussions from social media and a natural language process (NLP) method based on topic modeling to uncover various issues related to COVID-19 from public opinions. Moreover, we also investigate how to use LSTM recurrent neural network for sentiment classification of COVID-19 comments. Our findings shed light on the importance of using public opinions and suitable computational techniques to understand issues surrounding COVID-19 and to guide related decision-making. In addition, experiments demonstrated that the research model achieved an accuracy of 81.15% — a higher accuracy than that of several other well-known machine-learning algorithms for COVID-19—Sentiment Classification.

Towards an Effective Health Interventions Design: An Extension of the Health Belief Model

Mental health applications hold great promise as interventions for addressing common mental issues. Although many people with mental health issues use mobile app interventions, their adherence level remains low. Low engagement affects the effectiveness of mobile interventions. However, there is still a dearth of research to explain the reasons for low engagement. User experience and usability are two factors that determine the adoption and usage of apps. Analyzing user reviews of mobile apps for mental health issues reveals user experience and what features users liked and disliked in the apps and hence informs future app design and refinements. This research aims to analyze user reviews of publicly available mental health applications to uncover their strengths, weaknesses, and gaps, hence revealing why users are likely to cease using these applications. We mined reviews of 106 mental health apps retrieved from Apple’s App Store and Google Play and employed thematic analysis on 13,549 reviews. The review analysis shows that users placed more emphasis on the user interface and the user-friendliness of the app. Users also appreciated apps that present them with a variety of options, functionalities, and content that they can choose. Again, apps that offer adaptive functionalities that allow users to adapt some app features also received high ratings. In contrast, poor usability emerged as the most common reason for abandoning mental health apps. Other pitfalls include lack of a content variety, lack of personalization, lack of customer service and trust, and security and privacy issues.

Persuasive games and gamified systems are effective tools for motivating behavior change using various persuasive strategies. Research has shown that tailoring these systems can increase their efficacy. However, there is little knowledge on how game-based persuasive systems can be tailored to individuals of various personality traits. To advance research in this area, we conducted a large-scale study of 660 participants to investigate how different personalities respond to various persuasive strategies that are used in persuasive health games and gamified systems. Our results reveal that people's personality traits play a significant role in the perceived persuasiveness of different strategies. Conscientious people tend to be motivated by goal setting, simulation, self-monitoring and feedback; people who are more open to experience are more likely to be demotivated by rewards, competition, comparison, and cooperation. We contribute to the CHI community by offering design guidelines for tailoring persuasive games and gamified designs to a particular group of personalities.