Lisette Van Gemert-pijnen*, University of twente, enschede, Netherlands Track: Research Presentation Topic: Persuasive communication and technology Presentation Type: Oral presentation Submission Type: Panel Presentation Building: MECC Room: Auditorium 2 Date: 2010-11-29 01:30 PM – 02:30 PM Last modified: 2010-09-21

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Persuasive eHealth provides a renewed vision on supporting health care by technology. Persuasive Technology focuses on how motivational and affective technologies used to create, maintain, or change human thought and behaviour may be. Persuasive health care technology has its roots in a combination of well-established research in social psychology, communication, health care informatics and creative technologies. This multidisciplinary field of health care technology brings a special contribution to the Medicine 2.0'10® conference. In this panel we address motivational and affective aspects of eHealth technologies to maximize the beneficial effect on health care. Technological products and services should not only be excellent from the conventional viewpoints of multifunctionality and usability. They should also motivate users to use and continue to use technology and change their behaviour. In order to be effective, technology has to provide a positive user experience, emotionally or affectively. Such positive experiences include pleasure, fun, excitement or social connectedness (Web 2.0). Especially feedback systems are important for adherence and persistence in use and for motivating patients or professionals to do the right things at the right moments. Some patients have to cope with difficult life situations of isolation, e.g., when they are physically disabled or have to stay in quarantine for a longer period when carrying a multi-resistant micro-organism (think of H1N1). Technology that allows people to remain socially embedded in isolated life situations prevents depression. Building on web-based and smart technology, there are endless possibilities to develop motivational and affective applications. From a technological viewpoint, nearly everything is feasible, technological components are relatively inexpensive. However, what is needed today is the creativity to invent useful applications and combine the technological components into user friendly systems to realize these applications. This means there has to be attention for the creative use of motivational and affective technology in the context of eHealth, like using persuasive design principles, innovative feedback systems for participating in the design process and smart systems for persistence in use (triggers, goal setting; dialogue applications). We do not expect that the panel will generate conclusive answers for improving health care by technology, we will rethink and revisit the opportunities for current and future persuasive technology to create sustainable and innovative applications for supporting health care. We will focus on various challenging aspects for supporting health care via technology to realize behaviour changes e.g., smart wizards, social feedback systems, agents and wizards and smart search engines for adherence persistence in usage.

Dr. Gunther Eysenbach will be the discussant of the panel. Dr. B.J. Fogg will present his new ideas on persuasive technology via a video-presentation. Several researchers will present their view on adherence and persuasive technologies. Dr. Lisette van Gemert-Pijnen and Dr. Angelica Mader are the moderators of the panel.