Personalized Persuasive Technologies for Engagement and Behaviour Change

Abstract

1 SUMMARY The Covid-19 pandemic has urgently forced public attention on the impact of individual behaviours on the community’s safety, health, and prosperity. Health authorities, politicians, and the media appeal to citizens to engage in safe behaviours – wearing masks, social distancing, hygiene, vaccinating – for the benefit of the vulnerable, and ultimately, for every member of society. As known in the physics of complex systems and economics, macro-level phenomena result from patterns of micro-level behaviours of individuals. Small changes in individual behaviours, adopted massively due to incentives, constraints (laws and regulations), or powerful ideas, lead to macro-level changes in the economy, society, and the ecological or epidemiological situation that can benefit or harm everyone. Changing human behaviour has been the explicit purpose of every society’s educational, legal, and political system in history. The development of digital technologies has enabled the promotion and support of behaviour change at a personal level through personalized education and persuasion, rewards and incentives, monitoring, tracking, and policing human behaviours. Persuasive technologies have been developed with a wide spectrum of purposes. On one side of the spectrum, one can find technologies that benefit mostly the individual (e.g. recommender systems, intelligent tutoring systems). In the middle of the spectrum are technologies