Personalizing and Adapting Behaviour Change Systems

Interactive systems that aim to motivate people to adopt behaviours and actions that are beneficial for them and their community are attracting the attention of governments, practitioners, and researchers. Persuasive Technologies (PTs) are interactive systems designed to motivate desirable behaviour change. Despite the growing interest and investments into PTs, current PT design frameworks suffer a major limitation: They are based on the one-size-fits-all approach and hence resulting PTs are not personalized to be appropriate for the target user(s). Personalization in persuasive technologies is challenging, since motivating users for a particular behaviour or action needs to take into account a wide range of individual and context-dependent factors. The primary objective of this research is to develop, evaluate, and refine novel multi-dimensional mechanisms (that considers multiple factors simultaneously) for personalizing and adapting persuasive technologies to make them appropriate for individual users and increase their efficacy at promoting positive behaviour. First, we will develop multidimensional personalization models of user's responses to distinct persuasive strategies using both explicit and implicit user behaviour data gathered via user studies, using interaction log, and physiological responses across various behaviour contexts. Second, to evaluate the efficacy of the models across various persuasion contexts, we will apply the models to design, develop, and evaluate new model-driven personalized and adaptive persuasive systems targeting three technical domains (digital games, mobile, and social computing) and two application areas (health/wellness and safety/security). The persuasive systems will be targeted at diverse audience including at-risk and underserved Canadian populations: African Nova Scotians and Aboriginals, older adults, and youths.The primary outcomes of this research will be: 1) The development of novel multi-dimensional mechanisms for personalizing and adapting persuasive systems, and 2) applications of these mechanisms in designing and evaluating several personalized persuasive systems that motivate and assist users towards beneficial behaviours. Overall, successful completion of this research will lead to technological advances in the area of adaptive systems design. Our innovations have the potential for economic benefits within the Canadian computer games industry, to inform better game designs. Finally, our work inscribes in the broader framework of adaptive and intelligent systems for social good: it can improve the lives of Canadians by targeting several problem domains (including safety/security and health/wellness). This work can help everyone, but can also target specific, at-risk Canadians and under-served populations (e.g., African Nova Scotians, Aboriginals, older adults).