A. Aldo Faisal

Svenja Pieritz, Mohammed Khwaja, A. Aldo Faisal et al.

The recent growth of digital interventions for mental well-being prompts a call-to-arms to explore the delivery of personalised recommendations from a user's perspective. In a randomised placebo study with a two-way factorial design, we analysed the difference between an autonomous user experience as opposed to personalised guidance, with respect to both users' preference and their actual usage of a mental well-being app. Furthermore, we explored users' preference in sharing their data for receiving personalised recommendations, by juxtaposing questionnaires and mobile sensor data. Interestingly, self-reported results indicate the preference for personalised guidance, whereas behavioural data suggests that a blend of autonomous choice and recommended activities results in higher engagement. Additionally, although users reported a strong preference of filling out questionnaires instead of sharing their mobile data, the data source did not have any impact on the actual app use. We discuss the implications of our findings and provide takeaways for designers of mental well-being applications.

Mohammed Khwaja, Miquel Ferrer, Jesus Omana Iglesias et al.

Recommender Systems have not been explored to a great extent for improving health and subjective wellbeing. Recent advances in mobile technologies and user modelling present the opportunity for delivering such systems, however the key issue is understanding the drivers of subjective wellbeing at an individual level. In this paper we propose a novel approach for deriving personalized activity recommendations to improve subjective wellbeing by maximizing the congruence between activities and personality traits. To evaluate the model, we leveraged a rich dataset collected in a smartphone study, which contains three weeks of daily activity probes, the Big-Five personality questionnaire and subjective wellbeing surveys. We show that the model correctly infers a range of activities that are 'good' or 'bad' (i.e. that are positively or negatively related to subjective wellbeing) for a given user and that the derived recommendations greatly match outcomes in the real-world.