MODEL, FRAMEWORK, AND PLATFORM OF HEALTH PERSUASIVE SOCIAL NETWORK

[摘要] Persuasive technology (PT) has the potential to support individuals to perform self-management and social support as a part of health behavior change. This has led a few researchers in the intersection of the areas of health behavior change and software engineering to apply behavior change and persuasion theories to software development practices, enabling them to create innovative design principles and development-evaluation frameworks. Unfortunately these are too general for designing and evaluating health PT. Therefore, this dissertation proposes a model, framework, and platform of PT specifically designed for health intervention. The model and framework inform what, why, and how conceptually the suggested and required health behavior change strategies should be transformed into system features; and the platform explains how technically the transformation should be done. The platform includes functional requirements and provides most of the basic and standard computer code to develop the system features of such PT. The model, framework, and platform were designed to work with various health behavior change programs. Nevertheless, in this dissertation, they support health behavior change for physical activity. As an implementation of and tool to evaluate the model, framework, and platform, a technology called Persuasive Social Network for Physical Activity (PersonA) is introduced. PersonA is a combination of automatic input of physical activity data, a smart phone, and social networking. Two systems (SocioPedometer and PAMS) as leverages of PersonA have been developed and evaluated. The model, framework, and platform were evaluated based on the results of SocioPedometer’s usability testing and 4-week trials (n=14) and on PAMS’s usability testing (n=5). The results suggest that the systems were usable and accessible and that users were satisfied and enjoyed using it. Additional evaluations to the model and framework were conducted with the main purpose of eliciting users’ preferences with respect to the characteristics and system features proposed in the model and framework. They rated most of the characteristics as extremely important (average 4.27 of a 5.00 maximum) and most of the system features as very important (average of 4.09). The platform allowed the two systems to be easily developed by customizing the data input and information presented.

[发布机构] the University of Pittsburgh