CyberSightings

In the Spotlight

As every year, so this January, the famous Consumer Electronics Show—best known as CES—brought together in Las Vegas the biggest firms on the planet to exhibit their products. Interestingly for cyberpsychologists, this edition of the event made it clear that “self-tracking” and “lifelogging” are among the top technology trends of 2013. From “intelligent cutlery” designed to make you eat your meals more slowly, to wearable devices that track physical activity, calories burned, sleep quality, and even stress, a new wave of “personal well-being monitors” is literally invading the market. Although many types of such tools are available, they share the goals of helping people to achieve their targets, keeping them more informed, and ultimately improving their physical and mental health. However, the idea of using information and communication technology to “motivate the healthy” is not new. Actually, this concept is at the heart of “Persuasive Technology” vision, as theorized by Stanford psychologist, B.J. Fogg more than a decade ago (Fogg, B.J., 2002, Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do, Morgan Kaufmann). According to Fogg, a persuasive technology is a computing system, device, or application purposefully designed to change a person's attitude or behavior in a predetermined way. While persuasive technologies are found in many domains, significant attention has been directed on behavior change in health domains. In an interesting review of these applications, Chatterjee and Price have described how persuasive health tools have been evolving and changing over the years (Chatterjee, S., & Price, A., 2009, Healthy Living with Persuasive Technologies: Framework, Issues, and Challenges. J Am Med Inform Assoc., 16, 171–8). These authors divide the available technologies into four generations:

First generation systems, which they call “prescriptive systems,” started in the late 1960s and 70s and were mainly concerned with human one on one persuasion, with a physician or healthcare provider trying to convince a patient to take care of his/her health. The technology used to implement these motivational interventions was mainly the telephone, sometimes supported by computer-generated brochures.

The second generation systems are what Chatterjee and Price call “descriptive systems.” These are Internet-based methods that provide information and educational content delivered to users first through personal computers, and later through mobile phones. In this type of system, the content shared was more than text and frequently included multimedia data such as images, audio, and video.

Third generation systems are defined by these authors as “environmental systems”. They are differentiated from the previous generation of persuasive health technologies by three key features: the use of wearable sensors to collect data, the application of context aware technologies able to infer the state of the user in a certain time and place, and the provision of motivational feedbacks or recommendations delivered through different types of devices.

And what about the next generation of persuasive health technologies? According to Chatterjee and Price, the emerging trend is toward the use of mobile devices such as smartphones and PDAs. In particular, the next generation of persuasive health technologies will rely on extensive pervasive sensing of the users environment and will take advantage of powerful software engines that can process, mine, and send suggestions in a completely automated way. By leveraging on the advances in pervasive computing, sensing, and agent technology, the next persuasive systems will become our “personal health trainer,” thus radically transforming our approach to primary prevention. However, the development of a whole spectrum of wearable (and home-based) sensors capable of measuring cheaply and possibly noninvasively is still a major challenge for this vision to be realized. Apart from strictly hardware considerations, much research effort needs to be done to improve the quality and trust of self-tracking services and tools. In fact, the level of acceptance of these technologies depends on how reliable, and hence useful, the proposed system is, and on how significantly its output improves our quality of life.

Upcoming Meetings