Persuasive health technology

This chapter aims to describe persuasive health technology to help you understand the strategies that can improve the adherence to eHealth technologies and increase their effectiveness. As we have seen in Chapter 2 , behaviour change is important to improve health and well-being. Behaviour change techniques can be implemented in eHealth technology to support users in reaching their goals. Persuasive technology can be seen as the technological instantiation of these behaviour change techniques. Indeed, the technology needs to be persuasive to increase the chances of people using the technology and reaching its health and well-being goals. Chapter 10 has shown that methods from Human-Centred Design can be employed to make a technology that is appealing and fi tting with the users’ needs. In this chapter, we will show that technology can do more than just be appealing, as it can also be persuasive and in this way be an excellent support for users to reach their own goals. The chapter starts with an introduction to persuasive technology and how this technology has been applied in the context of improving health and well-being. We introduce the Persuasive Systems Design (PSD) model and how it can be used to develop and evaluate eHealth technologies. After completing this chapter, you will be able to:

• explain what persuasive technology is, and in what way domains such as persuasive communication, health promotion, social marketing, technology acceptance and human-media interaction are underlying foundations.