Digital Behaviour Change Intervention: Personalizing Persuasive Games for Wellbeing

Digital behaviour change interventions (also known as Persuasive Technology) encourage people to change their attitudes and behaviours. My research project aims to investigate the design of a gamified persuasive intervention as a proactive response for preventing mental health problems and improving subjective wellbeing in a student population. I am particularly interested in 1) encouraging students to engage in positive activities that induce happiness and 2) adapting persuasive strategies to different personalities, active stressors, attitudes and past behaviours.
Students are continually exposed to a variety of stressors during their academic career, which can induce high levels of psychological distress, depression, anxiety and loneliness. Moreover, students who experience mental health problems might feel nervous about receiving care or seeking support from their institution and local practitioners. This can lead to numerous health complications and have a major influence on student confidence, academic performance and subjective wellbeing. It is, therefore, critical that students receive appropriate support, tailored to their needs, throughout their academic journey. Persuasive Technology can motivate, shape and reinforce beneficial behaviours, helping individuals to reduce the negative impact of risk factors or stressors and to enhance the effect of protective factors. Thus, digital behaviour change interventions can facilitate the integration of preventive models that would allow early detection of symptoms and enable a larger number of individuals to access support remotely. Using persuasive technology to promote wellbeing would reduce time costs and financial expenses for mental healthcare providers and support services, as well as encourage initiative, empower individuals, promote self-care and improve self-management skills.
Inspired by research in positive psychology, my PhD project involves the design of algorithms for a gamified persuasive intervention that encourages engagement in positive activities. The main focus of my work is tailoring persuasive strategies for motivating student engagement in meaningful, achievable and enjoyable activities which increase happiness and support students in managing stressors more effectively. My project also involves performing user studies (both qualitative and quantitative) to inform and validate those algorithms, as well as controlled experiments to evaluate the perceived and actual effectiveness of the gamified intervention. While digital behaviour change interventions can be delivered using various approaches, I chose to focus on persuasive games due to their strong motivational pull. Persuasive games are very interactive and require active engagement from participants, which can increase the emotional quality of the intervention and contribute as an incentive to keep users engaged. As a result, an increasing number of persuasive games have been developed in recent years as novel solutions for motivating healthier behaviours, such as encouraging physical activity and balanced nutrition. Despite the growing interest in persuasive games, there remains a need for further research into their application in the wellbeing domain and the different aspects of design and personalisation of games which promote happiness. My PhD builds on work in the areas of Persuasive Technology (including Gamification), Intelligent User Interfaces, User Modelling and Personalisation. The findings of this work will have implications for the personalisation and design of persuasive technology for health and wellness.