Persuasive E-Health Design for Behavior Change

Many scientists are currently considering whether we are seeing a paradigm shift in the psychosocial and behavioral health sciences from narrow experimental studies to ecological research driven by big data. At the forefront of this trend is the implementation of smart device technologies in diverse research endeavors. This enables scientists to study humans in everyday life on a longitudinal level with unprecedented access to many relevant psychological, medical, and behavioral variables including communication behavior and psychophysiological data. Although the smartphone without doubt presents the most obvious 'game changer', it only represents a small part of a larger development toward the Internet of Things, where everything from household machines to the car will be connected to the Internet. Therefore, human interaction with all these Internet-connected devices will leave digital traces to be studied by scientists in order to predict bio-psycho-social variables ranging from personality to clinical variables including states of physical and mental health. The present volume gives an overview on current developments in this area, looking at digital phenotyping and mobile sensing as two prominent approaches in Psychoinformatics, i.e., the research field that combines innovative technological attempts with the psychosocial and behavioral health science traditions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)