Smart-phone application design for lasting behavioral changes

Abstract

The Smart-Condo interdisciplinary team (including computing science, industrial design, health psychology and occupational therapy) conducts research on putting ICT in the service of health care, focusing on empowering individuals to take control of their health management. This past year, the focus of our activities has been the development of a framework for the design and development of mobile apps to encourage behavioral changes. Grounding our framework the Theory of Planned Behavior and the Intention-Behavior Gap Theory, we explicitly designed all the functions in our applications to influence behavior. From a technical perspective, the applications support personalization, easy data recording and interactive reviewing, and subtle interventions (reminders and personalized information) to help behavior change. The user interface, informed by design theory, is conceived to make the applications engaging and easy to navigate. Bringing these three areas of knowledge together in the design of our apps will enable the systematic construction of a family of applications that together will have the potential to affect significant behavior change. In this paper we discuss the framework and the first two applications we have developed with it.