An unhealthy diet has become a leading risk factor for many diseases. The use of gamification elements (GEs) in nutrition apps offers a promising approach to change the eating habit. But, the design of GEs is often insufficient, leading to low user retention. Hence, the consideration of the underlying context and the target users' preferences is essential. By conducting a survey with 220 possible users following the best-worst-scaling method, we found that goals, performance graphs, progress bars, rewards, and levels were the most preferred GEs in nutrition context. Leaderboards, narratives, social interaction, and badges were less desired. On average, five elements are perceived as optimal by most survey participants. Compared to users' preferences in education and physical activity contexts, similarities, but also differences, were found. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of contextual differences of GE preferences and provide starting points for further research on gamification.
Stress is a major public health concern and a severe threat to everyone. Facilitated by their powerful sensing capabilities, mobile devices may assist individuals in coping with stress. Building on existing studies and mobile apps supporting stress coping, we propose the design of a mobile coping assistant that uses multimodal sensor data to reduce its user's stress. Based on sensor data, a mobile coping assistant (1) warns the user about elevated stress, (2) delivers a fundamental understanding of why they are currently stressed, (3) recommends targeted coping strategies to encourage and train effective coping behavior, and (4) executes automated actions to reduce stress exposure. The presented design comprises an architecture, good practices for designing the architectural components, and an algorithm for selecting adequate coping actions and recommendations. A prototypical instantiation indicates opportunities and challenges. Future research should evaluate the short-and long-term effectiveness of mobile coping assistants in the field.
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