Co-Drink: Exploring Social Support Water Bottles to Increase the Hydration Status of Individuals with Intimate Relationship

Abstract

Due to busy work routines in the modern society, it is common that people neglect to drink water. Social influences, such as interactions between friends and lovers, appears to be crucial to foster healthy behaviors. In this study, we investigate leveraging social support mechanisms in the design of persuasive technology to increase the frequency of daily fluid intakes. We firstly carried out an auto-ethnography as well as a probe-based co-design study to explore dedicated social mechanisms for promoting healthy hydration habits. This led to the conceptualization of Co-Drink that focuses on technology-enabled social interactions between individuals with intimate relationships to stimulate their water intake behaviors. Co-Drink was implemented as a pair of smart water bottles with ambient light. It also associated with an app to facilitate a coaching mode and a co-learning mode for persuading health behavior change. The prototypes of Co-Drink were evaluated in a Wizard-of-Oz study with three dyads of college students. Results showed its benefits for hydration health promotion and applicability for daily life use, due to the embedded social mechanisms and the ambient displays integrated with the water bottle. Based on these qualitative findings, we discuss implications for the future development of persuasive technologies for improving water intake behaviors.