Prescriptive persuasion and open-ended social awareness

Abstract

Most mobile technology systems designed to encourage healthy decisions focus on prescriptive persuasion, telling the user either implicitly or explicitly what to do, as the primary means of improving health. However, other technically and socially viable options exist. Drawing on both relevant social theory and previous CSCW research, this paper suggests that open-ended social awareness, making users aware of both others' and their own decisions, may also serve as an effective central design principle for mobile health. To explore this approach, this paper presents analysis of qualitative data from two studies of such a system.Results suggest that open-endedness allowed users flexibility and freedom in defining what counts as health, and that the social aspects compounded both the positive and the occasionally negative impacts of this openness. The paper concludes with implications for the design and evaluation of research on mobile health technology, as well as suggestions for how future work can further explore the design space of mobile health beyond prescriptive persuasion.

Designing for Healthy Lifestyles: Design Considerations for Mobile Technologies to Encourage Consumer Health and Wellness

“…For instance, social influence -sharing of health-behavior information within the application and on social networks, competition, and provision of social support -is an increasingly common strategy used in wellness applications. Such social features are found both in commercial applications (e.g., Fitbit, Nike+, Jawbone UP) and in research projects (e.g., [8,19,35,47]). Similarly, health is one of the key domains where gamification strategies have been used, and there is a growing number of mobile games designed to promote healthy behaviors (e.g., [38,61,72]).…”

“…The use of photos has been the more common strategy, employed both by research applications [8,14,63] and commercial ones (e.g., The Eatery 11 and PhotoCalorie 12 ). Rather than enter textual and numeric data about food, this dataentry strategy enables users to use the camera built into their mobile phones to simply take a picture of the food they are about to eat.…”

“…Even without any automatic processing of the data, this type of a visual journal can act as a reminder to eat healthier and exercise and can easily reveal that a person has been slipping on her wellness behaviors or goals. Similarly, users of the wellness application VERA [8] can use their phone's camera to take pictures of any activity that they think effects their health, including what they eat. Users can also annotate these images, creating a free-form journal of their engagement with their health and the way they understand their health goals.…”

“…In other cases, participants just got fed up because they performed a physical activity such as cycling or rock climbing and did not get any credit from the pedometer for doing those healthy activities. 8 Though this was a source of frustration for all groups, it was particularly frustrating for those whose step counts were being shared with group members because the step count did not necessarily reflect their day accurately.…”

ConCap

“…The first, and perhaps predominant approach is the use of 'persuasive' or 'nudge' interactions that encourage patients to adhere to specific behaviours that contribute to good health (e.g., [2,21]). This theme benefits from a wider contemporary interest in persuasive interaction and 'nudge' in HCI generally.…”