Health Behavior Change in HCI: Trends, Patterns, and Opportunities
This work addresses trends and gaps in HCI research for health behavior change, offering incremental insights for researchers and practitioners in digital health interventions.
The paper conducted a systematic review of health behavior change research in HCI, finding that physical activity is the most studied behavior, with adults as the primary participants, and identified a lack of standardized evaluation methods for user experience.
Unhealthy lifestyles could cause many chronic diseases, which bring patients and their families much burden. Research has shown the potential of digital technologies for supporting health behavior change to help us prevent these chronic diseases. The HCI community has contributed to the research on health behavior change for more than a decade. In this paper, we aim to explore the research trends and patterns of health behavior change in HCI. Our systematic review showed that physical activity drew much more attention than other behaviors. Most of the participants in the reviewed studies were adults, while children and the elderly were much less addressed. Also, we found there is a lack of standardized approaches to evaluating the user experience of interventions for health behavior change in HCI. Based on the reviewed studies, we provide suggestions and research opportunities on six topics, e.g., game integration, social support, and relevant AI application.