DISSERTATION
Abstract
Background
The communication is very important for the individuals to get persuasion from others. From daily routines to life decisions as well as buying behaviors of the people are directly influenced by their communication with others. However, in the 21st century, the communication and interaction are more directed by the computer systems and the persuasion become digital (Garcia-Betances et al. 2015). Therefore, the persuasive technology becomes subject to study in this modern world.
The information technology is not limited, but it has expanded in the everyday routine of individual from their activities to health fitness. For illustration, the number of healthcare applications can be discussed here that have designed and accessible to the consumers (Pinzon & Iyengar, 2012) such as 39,849 applications were available in 2013. As the technology is rising in the healthcare field, therefore, it becomes important to determine the persuasive technology in healthcare interventions. Although, a number of studies have already been done to understand the role of persuasive technology in the efficiency of healthcare interventions, however, the study in hands is aimed to find the influence of all the interventions in general.
Methods
The study used two methods include Systematic Literature Analysis and Systematic Search for applications through Google Play. However, the main model that followed throughout the study is PSD model (Persuasive System Design Model). For this purpose, three main domains of health care are taken into consideration include Lifestyle, chronic care, and mental health. 42 applications in total are selected as the top rated application in three domains to find their most useful feature out of primary support, dialogue support, social cognitive support and social support.
Results
Using IBM SPSS 22, the study conducted an analysis of the data found. The major findings of the first method results showed the positive influence of persuasive technology on the healthcare interventions, where, it is more effective to lifestyle domain as compared to chronic care and mental health. Furthermore, the primary support features are most useful to each domain of health as compared to other support features. However, the second method has found no statistical significance of the relationships developed; however, there are probabilities of errors.
Conclusion
The study concluded that persuasive technology has positive impacts on healthcare interventions either it is a lifestyle, chronic care or mental health. The results are important as helped to get the most highlighted domain in health care regarding the impacts of persuasive technology and features for the usage of technology. However, the study has some limitations such as small sample size. However, the results of the study might be changed in different times as other external factors can influence the findings.
Chapter 5- Discussion and Conclusion
The persuasive technology is defined as the process or system of changing the attitude or behavior or both. Various studies have already discussed the persuasive technology as the useful and important tool and technique in the healthcare field to deal with the challenges of different health problems and healthy lifestyle. The persuasive technology can be used in different domains and resources for life such as the older people can get support from such technology to live independently in the chronic disease situations. The problem of aging is increasing, and it is projected in the new report of United Nations that the population of individuals with age 60 or above will be more than the children and young individuals by 2050. It means that the need for the resources and methods to treat the growing population will also be increased as the aging population has more risks of health problems and chronic diseases (Hollander, 2016).
In addition to this, the low rate of children and young people in the future will also result in the difficulty of finding qualified, healthy and skilled personnel to treat the aging population with their diseases. These forecasts and future challenges resultto find the new ways and resources to treat the people as the resources and personnel are going to be limited and fewer. Different studies and researchers answered this need as the use of technology as the resource or way of treating people in future. The user of information technology such as computers, mobiles, and the internet have been grown around the world, and almost everybody involved is using internet connections and communications. With the rise in technology, the use of Internet for health purposes is also growing from last few years. It means that the Information Technology can be a better resource for health care (Knuas, 2015; Hollander, 2016).
Some online health interventions and applications have been launched to offer the behavioral changes related to health care and found as effective. There are several interventions exist online for health care with the desired and better outcomes as well as with significant and important effects on the health care. The number of studies has already been done using systemic reviews and established the results that persuasive technology plays an important role in the efficiency and effectiveness of the health interventions (Chatterjee & Price, 2009; Hollander, 2016). However, there is still a gap in the existing literature as there can be much more to know about the persuasive technology such as how and why persuasive technology is effective, does it effects on all the interventions, what features of the technology increases the efficiency of the interventions and do the features at each domainsimilar or differ. For finding answers and information relevant to above questions, the review of the previous studies and reviews is going to conduct in the study in hands.
The review of the existing information, studies, and reviews can help to find the role and influence of persuasive technology on the health interventions in general, identifying all domains of health and features of the technology. Finding the effects if on any of the domain of healthcare, the study is also going to examine the differences in the influence on each domain and the differences in using features of persuasive technology by each domain. The study is conducted with the significance in future to improve the usage of persuasive technology in more effective and influencing way to improve the health interventions. There are many different techniques of using persuasive technology in the health care interventions and based on these differences, the influences of technology to the efficiency of health care interventions are also different. It means that the effectiveness and efficiency of interventions can be varied in different domains of healthcare. To fill the gap in the existing studies, it is also important to analyze that which technique and feature of intervention are more effective for which domain of healthcare. There are many domains of healthcare such as lifestyle, chronic care, mental care, etc. Illustrating the topic, the self monitoring technique is not effective for mental health domain but a powerful method of persuasive technology for lifestyle.
Dissertation Statement
The study is attempted to obtain a general idea and analysis of the impacts of persuasive technology on the efficiency of the health interventions. In general, the persuasive technologies are the combination of theories of behavior change and technology to impact on the behavior and attitude of the individuals. The use of persuasive technology has been increased in the health care field to prevent different health problems and diseases as well as to support individual to get healthy in his/her daily life. For example, the number of mobile health applications has been launched in last few years such as health tips application, weight and obesity reduction applications, exercise applications, journal applications for daily diet, etc. For now, several studies have been conducted to understand the impacts of persuasive technology in multiple ways; however, the research studies are limitedin terms of their influence on the healthcare interventions. Even if, these studies have proved the impacts of persuasive technology on the efficiency of health interventions, however, no study for yet has focused towards all health domains in general. These studies remained more focused towards one domain (Hollander, 2016). Therefore, the study is going to get reviews from these studies about different domains to obtain the broader overview of the effectiveness to all domains in general. To see the effects on each domain, the most effective method is to analyze the existing studies and reviews to gain deep insights about each domain.
Aims and Objectives
It is very important to clearly explain the purpose and aim of the studyto direct the study in the right way. The major purpose of the research in hands is to investigate the role of persuasive technology in healthcare applications to understand the influence of persuasive technology in the healthy life of the individual. The healthcare field is much diversified; therefore, the role of persuasive technology is going to study in relation to different health interventions. For this purpose, the study is aimed to find the most affected health domain with the highest application of persuasive technology out of the lifestyle, chronic care, and mental health, or either all three domains get affected and apply persuasive technology. In addition to this, the research is also aimed to analyze different features of healthcare persuasive technologies and applications to the healthcare domains.
Based on the above aims and purposes, the study is going to achieve the following objectives:
Research Questions
Based on the research aims and objectives highlighted above, the research study is going to answer the research questions as follows:
What is the influence of persuasive technology on effectiveness to health interventions?
What is the most healthcare domain that was highlighted in both the research and the applications?
What is the most used technique or feature for each health domain with regard to PSD model?
Hypothesis
Using the theoretical framework and models, the researcher developed the following hypotheses to test in the research:
H1: Persuasive technology impacts positively on the effectiveness of healthcare interventions
H2: Persuasive technology impacts positively on the lifestyle
H3: Persuasive technology impacts positively on chronic diseases
H4: Persuasive technology impacts positively on mental health
H5: Persuasive technology impacts positively on all three domains
H6: Primary support is the most useful feature for each health domain
H7: Dialogue support is the most useful feature for each health domain
H8: System credibility support is the most useful feature for each health domain
H9: Social support is the most useful feature for each health domain
Organization of Study
The study is organized in different chapters include Chapter 1 (Introduction), Chapter 2 (Literature review), Chapter 3 (methodology), Chapter 4 (Discussion and Analysis) and Chapter 5 (conclusion). The first chapter discusses the background of the study, introducing the topic of the dissertation with the aims and objectives, research questions and hypotheses. The literature review includes the extensive and broader review of the theories of social behaviors and technologies as well as models along with the review of the studies about persuasive technologies in health interventions.
Methodology chapter includes the methods to find the health domains and appropriate features of the technology that are more used in the health domain. It includes two methods; literature search and search in Google Play. Discussion chapter includes the findings and results presented in graphs and tables along with discussion and analysis of the findings. Last chapter concluded the results and findings from chapter 4 to answer the research questions and hypotheses.
Chapter 5- Discussion and Conclusion
Discussion
Although, several reviews have analyzed the persuasive technology as the factors affecting the health care interventions, however, to conduct the general analysis about all the domains, the study was needed the universal review of the influence of persuasive technology on the efficiency of the health domains. The systemic literature research reviewed 12 articles as per selected out of 270 research papers. All the reviews about persuasive technology at least noted the positive impact of persuasive technology on the health interventions. However, the most important finding in the systematic research was that lifestyle is the most effected domain of health interventions regarding influence of persuasive technology on interventions. Total 9 reviews were conducted to analyze the lifestyle domain individually where; it was also revealed that persuasive technology more influence on weight control and weight loss (Azar et al, 2013).
Two articles were reviewed individually about chronic care, three articles about mental health and two articles about all three domains in general, however, throughout findings, it is revealed that the chronic care and mental health although get positive influence from persuasive technology but less than the lifestyle domain. Furthermore, it is also noted in the findings that primary support such as personalization, monitoring and tailoring are the most highlighted features used in the persuasive technology for health interventions based on the PSD model (Chang et al., 2013; Cugelman et al., 2011; Lehto & OinasKukkonen, 2011). On the other hand, search through Google Play found 42 applications of health interventions in total and it also disclosed that primary tasks is the most useful features of persuasive technology for all three domains of health. However, the reasons for why the focuses of health interventions remains towards primary tasks may be differed such as one reason could be the goal oriented nature of the health interventions. In addition to this, another reason could be the easier implementation of primary tasks. It was also noted that lifestyle intervention use all features but mainly primary support as compare to other domains. The primary tasks are more goals oriented than other domains and it could be the major reason for such findings.
Conclusion
Summarizing the research, the review study was needed to collect and arrange the previous reviews about effects of persuasive technology on health interventions’ effectiveness. It helped to find the current knowledge and information about persuasive technology, its domains and useful features as well as interpretation helped to find more areas for future research.
With regards to research questions and hypotheses, the review proved the positive impacts of persuasive technology on effectiveness of health interventions (research question 1 and H1), positive impacts on all three domains (H2, H3, H4 and H5), where, lifestyle is the most highlighted domain (research question 2). The research also proved H6 (research question 3) as the primary support is the most useful features used by health interventions. The findings of the study are very useful for the future health interventions to understand the importance of persuasive technology and also the features of the technology. Future studies may find the different features; however, the current knowledge remained about primary tasks and therefore, H7, H8 and H9 are not supported.
List of References
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