Designing a system with persuasive communication to improve diet compliance for elderly users
L. M. van der Lubbe, M. C.A. Klein
Proceedings of the 13th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare, PervasiveHealth 2019
In this paper we introduce a system that uses persuasive communication to stimulate the participants of the PROMISS project to be adherent to their diet advice. We have done literature research towards the different personalization strategies that can be used for persuasive communication. In order to personalize the messages that are send by the system, user characteristics such as gender and personality traits can be used. Furthermore, the design of the system is tailored to the elderly target group. Existing literature towards design principles for elderly is consulted during the design process.
We have first created a prototype of the system and we evaluated this prototype during a pilot study with seven participants. From this pilot we learned more about how the users perceive the system, which gave us insights that are used to improve the system. One important remark made by the participants was about the limited added value of the system in their diet. Such remarks are taken into account for the next version of the application. Furthermore, we extended the requirements of the system with input from the dietitians from PROMISS, to take into account how the diets will be designed in the next trial of the PROMISS project. We have briefly evaluated the new design with participants of the pilot, who were very enthusiastic about the changes made. The system described in this paper will be used in the next trial of the PROMISS project.