Persuasive design of a mobile coaching app to encourage a healthy lifestyle during menopause

The menopause transition is associated with a series of physiological changes that can lead to a significant increase in cardiovascular and metabolic risk, but such changes are sometimes ignored by women for not being immediately evident. Furthermore, due to the consequences of menopause, to significantly reduce this risk women need to improve their lifestyle habits, especially those regarding diet, physical activity, and smoking. Therefore, to succeed women must be aware of their own menopause-related physiological changes, the importance of changing their health-related behavior, as well as the need of employing endogenous and exogenous strategies to do so. The widespread availability of new-generation mobile devices, the new frontiers of massive communication, and the ability to collect and analyze huge amounts of data coming from different domains, all support greater confidence in mobile applications designed for health and well-being. Despite the explosion of this type of software applications, there are currently no innovative examples addressing a self-aware approach to menopause by applying personalization, adaptability, and persuasion to motivate women to change and improve their lifestyle. The work presented herein is part of a project involving a multidisciplinary consortium with expertise in different domains: ICT services, data modelling and HCI research, clinical and experimental gynecology, socioeconomic research, and behavioral psychology. More details about the project can be found in [41]. The project's goal is to develop a mobile coaching system for women in the menopause transition who need to modify their lifestyle to reduce the consequent metabolic and cardiovascular risk. The major contribution of the present work is to provide valuable insights for future research in this particular domain, on how to intercept the elements acting as triggers for behavioral changes towards a healthier lifestyle, and utilize them in persuasive user interfaces for mobile apps. The main components of this system are: (i) A Virtual Individual Model (VIM), which describes a woman's profile according to bio-clinical, socio-economic, and psychological aspects. The VIM communicates with the other system's components, providing them with a time-dependent snapshot of the user's profile; (ii) A Recommendation Engine (RE) that provides the user with personalized suggestions based on data from the VIM; (iii) The front-end, which is the component that applies the persuasion principles in communicating with the woman via the Persuasive Interface (PI). In this work we describe the theoretical foundations that guided the PI construction and the HCI aspects involved in graphical user interfaces, which design was driven by participative sessions and tests with potential end-users. The paper is organized as follows: introduction; related work; applied methodology, with the persuasion context and strategies suitable for the specific domain; design, prototyping and test of the graphical user interfaces and the interaction mechanisms; conclusions and future work.