A grounded approach for applying behavior change techniques in mobile cardiac tele-rehabilitation

Sankaran, Supraja; Frederix, Ines; Haesen, Mieke; Dendale, Paul; Luyten, Kris; Coninx, Karin

doi:10.1145/2910674.2910680

Supraja Sankaran, Ines Frederix, Mieke Haesen, Paul Dendale, Kris Luyten, & Karin Coninx, A grounded approach for applying behavior change techniques in mobile cardiac tele-rehabilitation, in Proceedings of the 9th ACM International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments, PETRA 2016, Corfu Island, Greece, June 29 - July 1, 2016,63 (ACM 2016). DOI PDF

Abstract:

In mobile tele-rehabilitation applications for Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) patients, behavior change plays a central role in influencing better therapy adherence and prevention of disease recurrence. However, creating sustainab le behavior chan ge that holds a beneficial impact over a prolonged period of time remains an important challenge. In this paper we discuss various models and frameworks related to persuas ion and behav ior chan ge, and investigate how to incorporate these with a multidisciplinary user-centered design approach for creating a mobile tele-rehabilitation application. By implementing different concepts that contribute to behavior change and applying a set of distinct persuasive design patterns, we were able to translate the high-level goals of behavior theory into a mobile application that explicitly incorporates behavior change techniques and also offers a good overall user experience. We evaluated our system, HeartHab, in a lab setting and show that our approach leads to a high user acceptance and willingness to use the system in daily activities.