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https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1822/BCSS_2017_preface.pdf
Fifth International Workshop on Behavior Change
Support Systems (BCSS 2017)
in conjunction with the 12th International Conference on Persuasive Technology,
April 3-6, 2017, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Piiastiina Tikka1, Randy Klaassen2, Pasi Karppinen1, Robby van Delden2, Roelof de
Vries2, Lisette van Gemert-Pijnen3, Harri Oinas-Kukkonen1 and Dirk Heylen2
1
Oulu Advanced Research on Service and Information Systems Group, Faculty of Information
Technology and Electrical Engineering, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland
{piiastiina.tikka, pasi.karppinen, harri.oinas-kukkonen}@oulu.fi
2
Human Media Interaction, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer
Science, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
{r.klaassen, r.w.vandelden, r.a.j.devries@utwente.nl,
d.k.j.heylen}@utwente.nl
3
Psychology, Health & Technology, Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social
Sciences, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
{j.vangemert-pijnen}@utwente.nl
1 Introduction
Behavior Change Support Systems (BCSS), already running for the fifth time at Per-
suasive Technology, is a workshop that builds around the concept of systems that are
specifically designed to help and support behavior change in individuals or groups.
The highly multi-disciplinary nature of designing and implementing behavior change
strategies and systems for the strategies has been in the forefront of this workshop
from the very beginning. This year the workshop comprises new and interesting work
on BCSSs in general and also a more focused theme of design and evaluation of
coaching systems in the domain of health and well-being.
As technology becomes increasingly pervasive and ubiquitous, more and more of
us use it to access an ever-increasing variety of services from entertainment to health-
care. Sensors, wearables, tracker systems become more affordable and within the
reach of ever wider audiences [1,2]. Technology that can persuade – or indeed help us
persuade ourselves – now resides firmly within our everyday lives. Because of this
fluency with which technology is now at the disposal of so many people we can ob-
serve a change in the paradigm of technology use: technology is becoming humanized
[3] and the way we see it and how we use it is changing from being a mere utility to a
partnership and service media.
The concept of BCSS is broad as regards the problem domains, but the definition
of BCSS ensures that the research in this field maintains a clear identity. A BCSS can
be defined as “a socio-technical information system with psychological and behavior-
Fifth International Workshop on Behavior Change Support Systems (BCSS’17) 2
al outcomes designed to form, alter or reinforce attitudes, behaviors or an act of com-
plying without using coercion or deception ” (emphasis added) [4]. So, from com-
municating persuasive messages to tracking physical activity for the purpose of self-
reflection, BCSSs are drawn together by their intent: they are designed to produce a
pre-defined effect in the user of a given technology. The present workshop is, as al-
ways, interested in all work around BCSSs, but this year a specific branch, coaching
systems, was highlighted in the call as well.
Persuasive coaching strategies incorporated in technological products can have
enormous societal impact on health and well-being. Technology is becoming ever
more ubiquitous and this gives us the opportunity to coach people towards better and
healthy lifestyles. When designing and evaluating coaching strategies that make use
of technologies it is common to run into several challenges – be it design, methodo-
logical, technological or even ecological. These challenges cannot be tackled by re-
searchers from one discipline alone, and as such they require a collaborative, interdis-
ciplinary perspective. Stakeholders range from doctors and therapists to psychologists
and eHealth professionals, designers and programmers, and often end-users as well.
2 BCSSs
The persuasive technology field is becoming a linking pin connecting natural and
social sciences, requiring a holistic view on persuasive technologies, as well as multi-
disciplinary approach for design, implementation, and evaluation. Such systems can
involve the user of, for example, sensors for tracking activity and physiological re-
sponses, which in turn can be used in supporting self-reflection. Use of persuasive
technology aiming at behaviour change has burgeoned in recent years particularly in
the area of health and personal well-being, e.g. [5, 6]. Through advances in infor-
mation systems, their interfaces, and ever-increasing connectivity the possibilities for
using information technology as an extension of and a tool for influencing people
have reached a point where systems designed for persuasion will work fluently and
even with subtlety on the devices people carry with them almost all of the time.
A pervasive problem with a lot of the research in the field of persuasive technolo-
gy has to do with the lack of attention given to how such systems aim at influencing
behaviour, and which elements in them exactly contribute to their effect – otherwise
known as the black box phenomenon [4]. As a research lens, BCSS approach specifi-
cally aims at tracking the observable change from a system’s intention to the mecha-
nisms of reaching the outcomes.
3 Persuasive coaching strategies and challenges
Persuasive coaching strategies incorporated in technological products can have enor-
mous societal impact on health and well-being by coaching people towards `better’
and healthy lifestyles.
Fifth International Workshop on Behavior Change Support Systems (BCSS’17) 3
However, current research has not been able yet to tackle some of the challenges
that come with the design and evaluation of effective technologies. For example, it is
still a challenge to effectively design for long-term adherence (e.g., [7, 15]), to per-
sonalize or tailor effectively (e.g., [9, 13, 16]), to implement theoretical knowledge
into technology (e.g., [7, 12]), to evaluate constructs, strategies or methods in-the-
wild in various contexts (e.g., [10, 14]), to effectively make use of new possibilities in
sensing and monitoring people in daily life (e.g., [8, 9]), possibly even across plat-
forms, and to link back whatever findings we have to a deeper understanding of our
users, people, theories, methods and even our strategies (e.g., [11, 12, 13]).
When designing and evaluating coaching strategies that make use of technologies,
it is common to run into several challenges, be it design, methodological, theoretical,
contextual, technological or even ecological. These challenges cannot be tackled by
researchers from one discipline alone, and require a collaborative, interdisciplinary
perspective.
4 Topics
Topics for submissions included, but by no means were limited to:
Design & Development
• Engagement, Personalization, Integration, Connectivity, and Changes in Persua-
sive Technology.
• Smart communication and information systems.
• Interactive visualizations for personalization and social support.
• High tech, human touch / humanizing technology.
• Persuasive prompts to create engagement and involvement: Virtual environments,
ambient visualizations, etc.
• Developing just-in-time persuasive feedback to support activities real-time and
offline (e.g., triggers and alerts), using data generated by smart sensors, self-
tracking devices, wearable’s, etc.
• Connectivity designs for social support, e.g. for lifestyle change & wellbeing.
• Persuasive profiling to personalize interventions.
• Ethical issues of persuasive technology, big data and BCSSs.
• Value proposition design to create BCSSs that have value in practice for all stake-
holders, implementation issues.
• Persuasive strategies related to different outcomes (engage-
ment/resilience/attitudes/compliance/behaviors) and levels (individu-
al/community/society) of change.
Evaluation
• Measuring the impact of BCSSs and smart persuasive environments on individu-
als, community, and society.
Fifth International Workshop on Behavior Change Support Systems (BCSS’17) 4
• Evaluation methods for measuring various aspects of BCSSs; process and prod-
ucts measurements.
• Advanced big data analytics for measuring and interpreting self-tracking data from
wearables, multi- sensor data, etc.
• Adequate design for measuring the effect of persuasive strategies on task adher-
ence during usage and long-term effects (fractional factorial designs).
• Frameworks and methodologies to measure A/B/C-Changes (attitude, behavior or
compliance).
• Profiling personalities and matching them with persuasive strategies.
• Multimodal cues and the effects on adherence and outcomes.
• Advanced analytics to predict adherence, and to identify usage patterns and its
effects on adherence.
• Evaluation of persuasiveness of different BCSSs (mobile, ubiquitous, ambient
technologies, virtual environments, sensor-based, etc.).
• Design guidelines for practice, based on evaluation studies.
5 Presented work at BCSS 2017
BCSSs can be used in a broad range of problem domains from health to eco-
behaviour and beyond. This year’s selection of papers at the BCSS workshop illus-
trates this potential to variety: help, support, guidance and services can be provided to
those in need in various ways and in various domains.
Directly aiming at addressing a specific physical condition, Klaassen et al. (pp. 38-
45) and Terzimehic et al. (pp. 46-53) report on coaching applications for health.
Klaassen et al. present a proof-of-concept system for assisting young asthma patients
learn and monitor their condition as well as provide an interactive playground for
fitness improvement. While gamification in itself is an interesting area of persuasion
and coaching, combining real physical activity and play with technology that not only
provides the frame for the play but also helps monitor for example appropriate levels
of activity to match the players’ condition produces a new level to coaching with
technology.
Terzimehic et al. build on health-care recommendations of tracking occurrences
headaches by means of a diary, but with a focus on the analysis of the collected life-
style data to provide effective feedback to the users of HeadacheCoach app. A num-
ber of lifestyle elements have been identified to be likely triggers for headaches for
people with active primary headache disorder, such as sleep rhythm and eating behav-
ior. The paper explores how to study best feedback-giving methods that would best
transform the collected lifestyle data into behavior change as regards avoiding head-
ache triggers.
Technology can also mediate a behavior change intention, as seen in a study on us-
ing Twitter in promoting a healthier diet (pp. 14-27) In such a situation, the persuader
harnesses an existing system with potential to social influence as the tool for not just
delivering a message but making the system users active participants in the persuasion
process. On a similar track, Chen et al. (pp. 28-37) studied the use of dynamic text
Fifth International Workshop on Behavior Change Support Systems (BCSS’17) 5
messaging in helping people maintain self-tracking. The paper explores three encour-
agement systems, of which one encouraged participation in a social game. Making a
game a collective (group) effort where players collaborate to achieve a common goal
and having a real person sending text messages to promote game play appeared to
increase participation and maintain self-tracking.
Presenting work-in-progress, Iyengar et al. (pp. 7-13), looked into using persuasive
technology as a means of bridging a gap between clinical studies and clinical practice.
Iyengar et al. make a highly interesting proposal (with some literature based evidence
to support the proposal) that persuasive technology, i.e. BCSSs can provide “a useful
conceptual and theoretical framework” overcoming the problem of translating clinical
research into clinical practice.
Overall, the paper showed that the opportunities and challenges of designing behavior
change support systems require a collaborative, interdisciplinary perspective. Stake-
holders in our workshop papers range from doctors and therapists, to psychologists
and eHealth professionals, designers and programmers, and often end-users as well.
The importance of creating synergies between these stakeholders and researchers,
empowering the interdisciplinary aspect should be reflected in our design of behavior
change support systems.
References
1. van Gemert-Pijnen J.E.W.C., Peters, O., Ossebaard, H.: Improving eHealth. Eleven Interna-
tional publishers, The Hague (2013)
2. Kulyk, O., op den Akker, H.J.A., Klaassen, R., van Gemert-Pijnen, J.E.W.C.: Per-
sonalized Virtual Coaching for Lifestyle Support: Principles for Design and Evaluation. In-
ternational journal on advances in life sciences. 6(3-4), 300-309 (2015)
3. Oinas-Kukkonen, H. and Oinas-Kukkonen, H.: Humanizing the Web: Change and Social
Innovation. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke (2013)
4. Oinas-Kukkonen, H.: A foundation for the study of behavior change support systems. Per-
sonal and ubiquitous computing. 17(6), 1223-1235 (2013).
5. Karppinen, P., Oinas-Kukkonen, H., Alahäivälä, T., Jokelainen, T., Keränen, A-M., Salo-
nurmi, and Savolainen, M.: Persuasive user experiences of a health Behaviour Change Sup-
port System: A 12-month study for prevention of metabolic syndrome. International Journal
of Medical Informatics 96 51-62 (2016)
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Treating Depression through a Behavior Change Support System without Face-to-Face
Therapy. AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction (2015)
7. de Vries, R.A.J., Truong K.P., Kwint S., Drossaert C.H.C., and Evers V.: Crowd-Designed
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8. van Delden, R.W., Moreno, A.M., Poppe, R.W., Reidsma D., and Heylen D.K.J.: A Thing
of Beauty: Steering Behavior in an Interactive Playground. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI
Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, (in press), 2017
9. op den Akker, H., Klaassen, R., op den Akker, R., Jones, V. M., & Hermens, H. J.: Oppor-
tunities for smart & tailored activity coaching. In CBMS 546-547 (2013)
10. Klaassen, R., op den Akker, R., Lavrysen, T., & van Wissen, S.: User preferences for multi-
device context-aware feedback in a digital coaching system. Journal on Multimodal User
Interfaces, 7(3), 247-267 (2013)
11. Chatterjee, S., & Price, A.: Healthy Living with Persuasive Technologies: Framework,
Issues, and Challenges. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 16(2),
171–178. (2009)
12. Hekler, E. B., Klasnja, P., Froehlich, J. E., & Buman, M. P.: Mind the Theoretical Gap:
Interpreting, Using, and Developing Behavioral Theory in HCI Research. Proc. CHI 2013,
3307–3316. (2013)
13. Oinas-Kukkonen, H.: Behavior change support systems: A research model and agenda. In
Persuasive Technology (pp. 4–14). incollection, Springer. (2010)
14. van Delden, R. W.: (Steering) interactive play behavior. PhD thesis, University of Twente.
CTIT Ph.D.-thesis series No. 17-422 ISBN 978-90-365-4304-0 (2017)
15. Klasnja, P., Consolvo, S., & Pratt, W. How to evaluate technologies for health behavior
change in HCI research. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems pp. 3063–3072 (2011)
16. de Vries, R.A.J., Truong K.P., and Evers V.: Crowd-Designed Motivation: Combining
Personality and the Transtheoretical Model. In Persuasive Technology, 41-52. Springer In-
ternational Publishing. (2016)