Research has shown that social influence is a strong motivator of behavior change. However, in pe... more Research has shown that social influence is a strong motivator of behavior change. However, in persuasive technology research, limited studies exist showing the influence of age and gender on its effectiveness. To bridge this gap, we conducted a study among 323 participants on the level of susceptibility to four social influence strategies: Social Learning, Social Comparison, Competition and Reward. Our results reveal that 1) males and females vary in their level of susceptibility to Reward and Competition, with males being more susceptible than females; and 2) younger and older individuals vary also, with younger individuals being more susceptible to Competition, Social Comparison and Social Learning. Specifically, our results reveal that Competition, a powerful driver of intrinsic motivation, is most effective in bringing about behavior change in younger males, but least effective in older females. These findings provide designers with insight into effective ways of tailoring pers...
Research has shown that personalizing persuasive technologies can increase their effectiveness an... more Research has shown that personalizing persuasive technologies can increase their effectiveness and potentially leads to sustained behavioral change. Building on the success of the workshop in the past four years which attracted 100s of participants from over 20 different countries and led to a special issue, this year's workshop will further advance the research area by addressing outstanding challenges and opportunities identified during the previous workshops and developing a new focus areas for the field. The workshop aims to connect a diverse group of researchers and practitioners interested in personalization and tailoring of persuasive technologies. Attendees are encouraged to share their experiences, ideas, discuss key challenges facing the area, and discuss how to move the field forward. The workshop will cover broad areas of personalization and tailoring, including but not limited to personalization models, computational personalization, design and evaluation methods, a...
The realization that individuals may differ in their susceptibility to various persuasive strateg... more The realization that individuals may differ in their susceptibility to various persuasive strategies has motivated a shift of Persuasive Technology (PT) design from the traditional one-size-fits-all approach to a personalized approach that adapts to individuals’ preferences. In Persuasive Educational Technologies (PETs) design, learners’ cognitive level is an important dimension for personalization given that it can affect learners’ response to and processing of various instructional contents. However, the relationship between students’ cognitive level and their level of susceptibility to persuasive strategies has not been explored quantitatively in the extant literature. As a result, we conducted an empirical study among 117 participants to investigate whether learners’ cognitive ability is an important trait to be considered in learner’s PETs design. Specifically, we assessed participants’ levels of Intelligent Quotient (IQ) and their responsiveness to three commonly used persuasi...
Gamification[5]and games have been used and studied in a variety of applications related to healt... more Gamification[5]and games have been used and studied in a variety of applications related to health and wellbeing [6,7,13]. Nevertheless, their application in the domains of wellbeing and flourishing[8,14](the pursuit of a happy and meaningful life rather than the simple in existence of illness) remain considerably less studied than other more common application areas, such as physical health or fitness. Therefore, this Workshop[15] aimed to provoke research and discussion by bringing together a community of interested researchers to discuss theoretical and practical considerations and promote the development of research projects focused on “Positive Gaming”as a technique for realizing the Positive Computing[2] objective of using technology to foster flourishing. A total of eight papers were accepted and presented at the Workshop. They addressed a rich variety of topics covering various areas of positive gaming including methods to understand users and design gameful applications for...
Text Mining is concerned with extracting interesting and significant patterns or knowledge from u... more Text Mining is concerned with extracting interesting and significant patterns or knowledge from unstructured text data. In this paper, we applied the text mining approach using natural language processing (NLP) techniques, especially topic modelling (with automated topic labelling), in deconstructing the persuasive strategies implemented or employed by 100 mental health apps based on user reviews. We focus on the persuasive strategies in the primary task support category of the Persuasive Systems Design (PSD) framework. We used the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modelling algorithm, in conjunction with semantic attributes, to achieve our goal. Our experimental results revealed that self-monitoring is the most employed persuasive strategy. Finally, we compare our findings with that obtained using manual coding method and found significant similarities.
Persuasive games are more effective if they are personalized to the specific group of users under... more Persuasive games are more effective if they are personalized to the specific group of users under consideration. This paper presents a personalized persuasive game for motivating risky sexual behaviours in Africa. The arcadetype game simulates various sexual risky behaviours that could lead to contracting STDs and HIV and how to avoid them. It engages players in an interactive manner using various persuasive strategies with the aim of imparting knowledge and skills about safe sexual behaviours/practices and how to avoid risky sexual behaviours. The game uses the engaging concept of the popular ping-pong game and the principles of game-based learning to engage users in the game while subliminally persuading them to refrain from risky sexual behaviours/practices.
The fact that individuals may react differently toward persuasive strategies gave birth to a shif... more The fact that individuals may react differently toward persuasive strategies gave birth to a shift in persuasive technology (PT) design from the one-size-fits-all traditional approach to the individualized approach which conforms to individuals’ preferences. Given that learners’ gender, age, and cognitive level can affect their response to different learning instructions, it is given primacy of place in persuasive educational technology (PET) design. However, the effect of gender, age, and cognitive ability on learners’ susceptibility to persuasive strategies did not receive the right attention in the extant literature. To close this gap, we carried out an empirical study among 461 participants to investigate whether learners’ gender, age, and cognitive ability significantly affect learners’ susceptibility to three key persuasive strategies (social learning, reward, and trustworthiness) in PETs. The results of a repeated measure analysis of variance (RM-ANOVA) revealed that people w...
Self-monitoring is the cornerstone of many health and wellness persuasive interventions. However,... more Self-monitoring is the cornerstone of many health and wellness persuasive interventions. However, applications designed to promote health and wellness that use this strategy have recorded varying degrees of success. In this study, we investigated why the self-monitoring strategy might work in some contexts and fail in others. We conducted a series of large-scale studies, with a total of 1768 participants, to explore the strengths and weaknesses of the self-monitoring strategy. Our results uncover important strengths and weaknesses that could facilitate or hinder the effectiveness of self-monitoring to promote the health and wellness of its users. The strengths include its tendency to , , , , about their health and wellness. Some of the weaknesses include its tendency to , and . We contribute to the digital health community by offering design guidelines for operationalising self-monitoring to overcome its weaknesses and amplify its strengths.
games can be effective tools for motivating healthy behaviors and/or attitudes, and so recent yea... more games can be effective tools for motivating healthy behaviors and/or attitudes, and so recent years have witnessed an increasing number of persuasive games. However, most games adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to persuasion in their design. Studies on gameplay and player motivation have shown that treating gamers as a monolithic group is a bad design approach because a motivational approach that works for one individual may actually demotivate the desired behavior in others. To correct this problem, we conducted a large-scale study on 1108 gamers, which examined the persuasiveness of ten Persuasive Technology (PT) strategies, and the receptiveness of seven gamer types identified by BrianHex to the strategies most commonly used in PT design. We developed models showing the receptiveness of the gamer types to the ten strategies and created persuasive profiles, which are lists of strategies that can be employed to motivate behavior for each gamer type. Although we studied and created our models using ten strategies, in this paper, we report results of five strategies.
Research has shown that social influence is a strong motivator of behavior change. However, in pe... more Research has shown that social influence is a strong motivator of behavior change. However, in persuasive technology research, limited studies exist showing the influence of age and gender on its effectiveness. To bridge this gap, we conducted a study among 323 participants on the level of susceptibility to four social influence strategies: Social Learning, Social Comparison, Competition and Reward. Our results reveal that 1) males and females vary in their level of susceptibility to Reward and Competition, with males being more susceptible than females; and 2) younger and older individuals vary also, with younger individuals being more susceptible to Competition, Social Comparison and Social Learning. Specifically, our results reveal that Competition, a powerful driver of intrinsic motivation, is most effective in bringing about behavior change in younger males, but least effective in older females. These findings provide designers with insight into effective ways of tailoring pers...
Research has shown that personalizing persuasive technologies can increase their effectiveness an... more Research has shown that personalizing persuasive technologies can increase their effectiveness and potentially leads to sustained behavioral change. Building on the success of the workshop in the past four years which attracted 100s of participants from over 20 different countries and led to a special issue, this year's workshop will further advance the research area by addressing outstanding challenges and opportunities identified during the previous workshops and developing a new focus areas for the field. The workshop aims to connect a diverse group of researchers and practitioners interested in personalization and tailoring of persuasive technologies. Attendees are encouraged to share their experiences, ideas, discuss key challenges facing the area, and discuss how to move the field forward. The workshop will cover broad areas of personalization and tailoring, including but not limited to personalization models, computational personalization, design and evaluation methods, a...
The realization that individuals may differ in their susceptibility to various persuasive strateg... more The realization that individuals may differ in their susceptibility to various persuasive strategies has motivated a shift of Persuasive Technology (PT) design from the traditional one-size-fits-all approach to a personalized approach that adapts to individuals’ preferences. In Persuasive Educational Technologies (PETs) design, learners’ cognitive level is an important dimension for personalization given that it can affect learners’ response to and processing of various instructional contents. However, the relationship between students’ cognitive level and their level of susceptibility to persuasive strategies has not been explored quantitatively in the extant literature. As a result, we conducted an empirical study among 117 participants to investigate whether learners’ cognitive ability is an important trait to be considered in learner’s PETs design. Specifically, we assessed participants’ levels of Intelligent Quotient (IQ) and their responsiveness to three commonly used persuasi...
Gamification[5]and games have been used and studied in a variety of applications related to healt... more Gamification[5]and games have been used and studied in a variety of applications related to health and wellbeing [6,7,13]. Nevertheless, their application in the domains of wellbeing and flourishing[8,14](the pursuit of a happy and meaningful life rather than the simple in existence of illness) remain considerably less studied than other more common application areas, such as physical health or fitness. Therefore, this Workshop[15] aimed to provoke research and discussion by bringing together a community of interested researchers to discuss theoretical and practical considerations and promote the development of research projects focused on “Positive Gaming”as a technique for realizing the Positive Computing[2] objective of using technology to foster flourishing. A total of eight papers were accepted and presented at the Workshop. They addressed a rich variety of topics covering various areas of positive gaming including methods to understand users and design gameful applications for...
Text Mining is concerned with extracting interesting and significant patterns or knowledge from u... more Text Mining is concerned with extracting interesting and significant patterns or knowledge from unstructured text data. In this paper, we applied the text mining approach using natural language processing (NLP) techniques, especially topic modelling (with automated topic labelling), in deconstructing the persuasive strategies implemented or employed by 100 mental health apps based on user reviews. We focus on the persuasive strategies in the primary task support category of the Persuasive Systems Design (PSD) framework. We used the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modelling algorithm, in conjunction with semantic attributes, to achieve our goal. Our experimental results revealed that self-monitoring is the most employed persuasive strategy. Finally, we compare our findings with that obtained using manual coding method and found significant similarities.
Persuasive games are more effective if they are personalized to the specific group of users under... more Persuasive games are more effective if they are personalized to the specific group of users under consideration. This paper presents a personalized persuasive game for motivating risky sexual behaviours in Africa. The arcadetype game simulates various sexual risky behaviours that could lead to contracting STDs and HIV and how to avoid them. It engages players in an interactive manner using various persuasive strategies with the aim of imparting knowledge and skills about safe sexual behaviours/practices and how to avoid risky sexual behaviours. The game uses the engaging concept of the popular ping-pong game and the principles of game-based learning to engage users in the game while subliminally persuading them to refrain from risky sexual behaviours/practices.
The fact that individuals may react differently toward persuasive strategies gave birth to a shif... more The fact that individuals may react differently toward persuasive strategies gave birth to a shift in persuasive technology (PT) design from the one-size-fits-all traditional approach to the individualized approach which conforms to individuals’ preferences. Given that learners’ gender, age, and cognitive level can affect their response to different learning instructions, it is given primacy of place in persuasive educational technology (PET) design. However, the effect of gender, age, and cognitive ability on learners’ susceptibility to persuasive strategies did not receive the right attention in the extant literature. To close this gap, we carried out an empirical study among 461 participants to investigate whether learners’ gender, age, and cognitive ability significantly affect learners’ susceptibility to three key persuasive strategies (social learning, reward, and trustworthiness) in PETs. The results of a repeated measure analysis of variance (RM-ANOVA) revealed that people w...
Self-monitoring is the cornerstone of many health and wellness persuasive interventions. However,... more Self-monitoring is the cornerstone of many health and wellness persuasive interventions. However, applications designed to promote health and wellness that use this strategy have recorded varying degrees of success. In this study, we investigated why the self-monitoring strategy might work in some contexts and fail in others. We conducted a series of large-scale studies, with a total of 1768 participants, to explore the strengths and weaknesses of the self-monitoring strategy. Our results uncover important strengths and weaknesses that could facilitate or hinder the effectiveness of self-monitoring to promote the health and wellness of its users. The strengths include its tendency to , , , , about their health and wellness. Some of the weaknesses include its tendency to , and . We contribute to the digital health community by offering design guidelines for operationalising self-monitoring to overcome its weaknesses and amplify its strengths.
games can be effective tools for motivating healthy behaviors and/or attitudes, and so recent yea... more games can be effective tools for motivating healthy behaviors and/or attitudes, and so recent years have witnessed an increasing number of persuasive games. However, most games adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to persuasion in their design. Studies on gameplay and player motivation have shown that treating gamers as a monolithic group is a bad design approach because a motivational approach that works for one individual may actually demotivate the desired behavior in others. To correct this problem, we conducted a large-scale study on 1108 gamers, which examined the persuasiveness of ten Persuasive Technology (PT) strategies, and the receptiveness of seven gamer types identified by BrianHex to the strategies most commonly used in PT design. We developed models showing the receptiveness of the gamer types to the ten strategies and created persuasive profiles, which are lists of strategies that can be employed to motivate behavior for each gamer type. Although we studied and created our models using ten strategies, in this paper, we report results of five strategies.
The evolving field of persuasive and behavior change technology is increasingly targeted at influ... more The evolving field of persuasive and behavior change technology is increasingly targeted at influencing behavior in the area of health and wellness. This paper provides an empirical review of 16 years (85 papers) of literature on persuasive technology for health and wellness to: (1.) answer important questions regarding the effectiveness of persuasive technology for health and wellness, (2.) summarize and highlight trends in the technology design, research methods, motivational strategies, theories, and health behaviors targeted by research to date, (3.) uncover pitfalls of existing persuasive technological interventions for health and wellness, and (4.) suggest directions for future research.
Long waiting time required before a patient sees a doctor and associated cost is one of the major... more Long waiting time required before a patient sees a doctor and associated cost is one of the major problems faced by many hospitals especially those in the developing countries. According to recent study, 97% of patients are frustrated by wait times at the doctor's office. Patients being kept on hold for so long before receiving medical services could result in waiting costs for them. Similarly, providing surplus doctors could result in excessive costs to the hospital. This paper discusses how persuasive technology can be used to reduce the overall cost often associated with long wait times to see a doctor by reducing patient's perceived wait times and determined an optimal number of doctors required to provide timely service to patients (server level). To achieve this, we examined and modelled the queuing characteristics, the waiting and service costs and optimal server level for all the twenty-two (22) Federal Medical Centers (FMCs) in Nigeria. Next, we present a persuasive messaging system to reduce waiting cost by reducing the perceived waiting time and persuade patients against leaving the hospital without seeing a doctor. The results of the study show that the average queue length, waiting cost of patients and likewise over utilization of specialist doctors at the FMC could be reduced at an optimal server level for a minimum total cost.
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Papers by Rita Orji