Using Persuasive Mobile Apps to Enhance Children's Health and Well Being: A Sri Lankan Experience

ABSTRACT

In this paper we claim that therein lies great potential in employing the use of persuasive mobile technology to improve nutrition and development monitoring of young children. A study based on urban Sri Lankan families was conducted to support the capability of a mobile app to supplement the existing paper based health record book. A number of interventions were deduced through user research that aimed to facilitate the self-efficacy of Sri Lankan parents. We present initial design concepts as software wireframes and the results from evaluating them with a set of 5 Sri Lankan parents. Our results show that parents were willing to comply with the recommendations of the mobile app. We conclude with future directions of the digital health book.

References

1. 1. BJ Fogg, Gregory Cuellar, and David Danielson. 2009. Motivating, influencing, and persuading users: An introduction to captology. Human Computer Interaction Fundamentals (2009), 109--122.
2. 2. Juho Hamari, Jonna Koivisto, and Tuomas Pakkanen. 2014. Do persuasive technologies persuade-a review of empirical studies. In Persuasive Technology. Springer, 118--136.
3. 3. Nurulhuda Ibrahim, Mohd Fairuz Shiratuddin, and Kevin Wong. 2013. Persuasion techniques for tourism website design. In The International Conference on ETechnologies and Business on the Web (EBW2013). 175--180.
4. 4. Predrag Klasnja, Sunny Consolvo, and Wanda Pratt. 2011. How to evaluate technologies for health behavior change in HCI research. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 3063--3072.
5. 5. S O'Connor, AM Devlin, M McGee-Lennon, M-M Bouamrane, S Browne, CA O'Donnell, and FS Mair. 2015. The Experiences of Health Visitors in Implementing a Digital Child Health Record, the Eredbook, in the United Kingdom: Some Challenges and Lessons Learned. (2015).
6. 6. Rita Orji, Regan L Mandryk, Julita Vassileva, and Kathrin M Gerling. 2013. Tailoring persuasive health games to gamer type. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2467--2476.
7. 7. Stephen Purpura, Victoria Schwanda, Kaiton Williams, William Stubler, and Phoebe Sengers. 2011. Fit4life: the design of a persuasive technology promoting healthy behavior and ideal weight. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference. ACM, 423--432.
8. 8. Tammy Toscos, Anne Faber, Shunying An, and Mona Praful Gandhi. 2006. Chick clique: persuasive technology to motivate teenage girls to exercise. In CHI'06 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems. ACM, 1873--1878.
9. 9. Nick Townsend, Julianne Williams, Kremlin Wickramasinghe, Waruni Karunarathne, Asela Olupeliyawa, Seenithamby Manoharan, and Sharon Friel. 2015. Barriers to healthy dietary choice amongst students in Sri Lanka as perceived by school principals and staff. Health promotion (2015), 1--11.
10. 10. Dinuka Wijetunga. 2014. The digital divide objectified in the design: Use of the mobile telephone by underprivileged youth in Sri Lanka. Journal of ComputerMediated Communication 19, 3 (2014), 712--726.
11. 11. Jie Xu, Ping-yu Chen, Scott Uglow, Alison Scott, and Enid Montague. 2011. A case study of the design and evaluation of a persuasive healthy lifestyle assistance technology: challenges and design guidelines. In Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. Applications and Services. Springer, 464--471.

Index Terms

• Human-centered computing