Persuasive Technology For Human Development: Review and Case Study
This work addresses the problem of leveraging technology for social good in developing countries, but it is incremental as it reviews existing concepts and applies them to a new context.
The paper explores persuasive technology as a tool for human development, proposing its application in Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICTD) to nudge behaviors in areas like education and health, with a case study in Pakistan illustrating its potential impact.
Technology is an extremely potent tool that can be leveraged for human development and social good. Owing to the great importance of environment and human psychology in driving human behavior, and the ubiquity of technology in modern life, there is a need to leverage the insights and capabilities of both fields together for nudging people towards a behavior that is optimal in some sense (personal or social). In this regard, the field of persuasive technology, which proposes to infuse technology with appropriate design and incentives using insights from psychology, behavioral economics, and human-computer interaction holds a lot of promise. Whilst persuasive technology is already being developed and is at play in many commercial applications, it can have the great social impact in the field of Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICTD) which uses Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for human developmental ends such as education and health. In this paper we will explore what persuasive technology is and how it can be used for the ends of human development. To develop the ideas in a concrete setting, we present a case study outlining how persuasive technology can be used for human development in Pakistan, a developing South Asian country, that suffers from many of the problems that plague typical developing country.