Behavior change support systems (BCSS) research is an evolving area. While the systems have been demonstrated to work to the effect, there is still a lot of work to be done to better understand the influence mechanisms of behavior change, and work out their influence on the systems architecture. The papers of the second BCSS workshop aim at filling this gap. They test existing influence strategies and suggest new ones, develop evaluation methods of influence strategies, and introduce systems architectures that support novel influence strategies.
Introduction
An emphasis of research in Behavior Change Support Systems or BCSS
Technological advances that reduce the size of information and communication
technology (ICT) and make it globally interconnected both challenge and open up
opportunities for researchers of behavior change support systems. ICT is
becoming increasingly ubiquitous and embedded in objects of the everyday life,
contributing towards humanizing those technologies
The aforementioned trends put increasing pressure on BCSS researchers. Growing need for behavior change support systems means that the researchers should start consolidating their research efforts to be able to offer easy to apply instructions to their growing audience with limited background in BCSS. To meet the demand, several theoretical areas should be targeted. First, the recent developments in relevant consumer technologies (i.e. ICT, personal health technology) and in cognitive psychology should be better integrated in the BCSS paradigm in the form of strategies of influence. Second, BCSS design methods and tools should be advanced to a level at which BCSS people with limited background in the field could apply the BCSS paradigm in designing effective behavior change support systems. Finally, evaluation tools for the BCS systems need to be validated to ensure the performance of the systems in real-life applications. 2
Advances in BCSS research The papers of the BCSS2014 workshop address three timely issues in design and development of effective behavior change support systems: identification of effective influence strategies of BCSS, evaluation methods for BCSSs, and new tools to define and construct BCSS architectures. We will next highlight, in brief, the key ideas behind the papers included to the Proceedings of the workshop. 3' 2.1
In their paper, de Jong and associates (2014) evaluate constructs developed for
measuring perceived persuasiveness in technology. They find that, in general, the
different measures line up with the data obtained with Perceived Persuasiveness
Questionnaire (PPQ). However, the relationship between perceived
persuasiveness
Caon and co-authors (2014) describe at conceptual level the Virtual Individual Model that will be integrated to the PEGASO system through an ontology-based virtualization. The aim of the project is to develop a system that is sensitive to characteristics of the individual and the interaction context and capable of using this information to dynamically select opportune tailored interventions. The PEGASO model is integrated to the system through an ontology-based virtualization.
Rao (2014) reports about her work on developing evaluation tools to assist the
design of persuasive game systems. The paper argues for applying persuasive
design principles to games design when behavior change is the fundamental end
of the game. The paper suggests that it is important to include gamification in a
discussion about persuasion through games, because persuasive strategies play a
central part in gamification design. Rao suggests that the Persuasive Systems
Design (PSD) model
Unal and colleagues (2014) examine users’ compliance to persuasive messages in mobile application recommendation domain and explore how persuadability of users affects their compliance. The authors motivate their research by noting that the rapid growth in mobile application market means a significant challenge to find interesting and relevant applications for users. They find that subtle methods of persuasion are more effective than obvious persuasive messages at creating compliance. Also, persuadability is an important determinant on individual’s compliance to recommendations.
Orji (2014) explores gender effects on the strategies for persuasiveness of BCSSs. They identify that there is a need to adapt persuasive approaches to various user characteristics and go on to test if gender is among the characteristics that should be taken into account when designing individualized persuasive strategies. The author concludes that gender-dependent approaches would generally be more appropriate for designing BCSSs that will effectively promote health behavior changes than the one-size fits all approach.
BCSS Design Alahäivälä and his co-authors (2014) aim at breaking out the black-box thinking in persuasive systems design. They present a software design pattern for giving rewards as a way of persuasive human-computer dialogue in BCSS. They argue that by developing software architectures and software design patterns, BCSS research can be enhanced from proof-of-concepts to concrete software development guidelines. The paper provides BCSS research with an intricate implementation level view of the software development aspects of BCSSs. Wartena and company (2014) discuss the issue of bridging the healthcare and designer point of views to intervention. They argue that social systems development around the BCSS would benefit from better understanding of the interaction between the user, mediator, social system and the socio-technical system involved. They present a game-architecture inspired design approach for BCSSs, and go on to demonstrate the benefits in the design process of combining four archetypal modes of use: trigger, intervention, assessment, and participation. Burrows and her colleagues (2014) discuss BCSS design in the domain of climate change and using social and digital media technologies to influence users to change their energy consumption behavior. They seek to understand how information about users may be utilized within the development of persuasive technologies and BCSSs. The authors identify how values, lifestyle aspects, and energy consumption behaviors may be modelled to BCSS to deliver relevant and personalized information and knowledge that can influence behavior change. 3
Discussion All in all the outlook of the BCSS field is promising. Persuasive technology and behavior change support systems research are in the position of giving back to practitioners and other fields of academic inquiry rather than just consume ideas sourced from the important reference disciplines. To make this happen, though, the field will have to amalgamate the recent findings in cognitive and other psychology and the technological advancements in ICT in its existing body of knowledge on how to apply information systems to persuade people change their behaviors. 5' Acknowledgements. We wish to thank the many people who have made the BCSS2014 workshop possible: Bernd Ploderer for helping with the web site; Sitwat Langrial, Bernd Ploderer and Wolfgang Reitberger for acting in the steering committee; Liisa Kuonanoja for helping to put the proceedings together; and the reviewers for reading through and commenting on the submissions. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
References Alahäivälä, T., Oduor, M., Oinas-Kukkonen, H.: A Reward Design Pattern in BCSS, Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Behavior Change Support Systems (BCSS2014), Padova, Italy, May 22 (2014) Burrows, R., Johnson, P., Johnson, H.: Influencing Behaviour by Modelling User Values: Energy Consumption, Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Behavior Change Support Systems (BCSS2014), Padova, Italy, May 22 (2014) Chae, M., Kim, J.: What’s So Different About the Mobile Internet? Communications of the ACM, 46 (12), 240-247 (2003).
Custers, R., Aarts, H.: The unconscious will: How the pursuit of goals operates outside of conscious awareness, Science, 329(47), 47-50 (2010)