Type 2 diabetic patients benefit significantly if the disease is well controlled through behavioral changes, namely adopting a healthy lifestyle. Currently, there is some evidence that technological strategies can help patient self-management. However, few studies have specifically targeted individuals who solely engage in automatic and personalized self-management practices. This study aims to synthesize the literature regarding personalized feedback recommendation systems to promote behavior change without health professionals’ direct intervention for the management of type 2 diabetes and to verify if the use of these systems improves health-related outcomes. A systematic review was performed from inception to April 13, 2021, based on a search conducted in six databases. According to the defined search expression, studies addressing type 2 diabetic patients and recommendation systems were included. In total, 2186 papers were initially identified, but only 22 met the specific inclusion criteria after screening. Discrepancies in the selection of studies were discussed in consensus meetings. To assess the quality of the articles, two tools were employed according to the types of articles retrieved. Selected papers were summarized regarding specific characteristics such as clinical and technological outcomes. Studies incorporating a recommendation system into their technological solution showed a positive effect on the evaluated outcomes, except for those with longer duration, where the effect was not statistically significant. Although most studies did not report the type of system used, expert systems (rule-based) were found to be the most prevalent among those that did. As behaviors are often difficult to change quickly, it is recommended that future studies extend their follow-up timeframe. Nevertheless, the data obtained suggest that technological solutions incorporating a recommendation system show potential to improve health-related outcomes and demonstrated good usability.

Type 2 diabetes is an increasingly prevalent disease and patients do not always manage the disease properly. Therefore, creating tools that help diabetics self-manage their condition over time is of the utmost importance. Technological tools that include features meeting this population's needs, with an integrated personalized feedback system, in an environment of gamified incentives, may be the way for developing a sustained app's usage. This work aims to present a still in development, novel approach to managing diabetes type 2 with a focus on data analysis from user-inputs, gamification, and personalized coaching, with an accessible user interface. Thus, we will present some functionalities, in particular the theoretical and practical concept that is behind this development, namely the Transtheoretical model of behavior change to create different profiles, to provide customized feedback according to the user's behavioral stage, and also to ascertain if it induces any improvement at the behavioral level.

Summary One of the most important factors to determine the success of an organization is the quality of decisions made. Supporting a decision‐making process is a complex task, mainly when decision‐makers are dispersed. Group decision support systems (GDSSs) have been studied over the last decades with the goal of providing support to decision‐makers; however, their acceptance by organizations has been difficult. This happens mostly due to usability problems, loss of interaction between decision‐makers, and consequently, loss of information. In this work, we present a web‐based GDSS developed to support groups of decision‐makers, regardless of their geographic location. The system allows the creation of multicriteria problems and the configuration of the preferences, intentions, and interests of each decision‐maker. The presented system uses a multiagent system to combine and process this information, using virtual agents that represent each decision‐maker. We believe that, with this approach, we will proceed in the refinements of a successful GDSS to correctly support decision‐makers while preserving the valuable intelligence and knowledge that can be generated in face‐to‐face meetings. Furthermore, the high level of usability that the system provides will contribute to an easier acceptance and adoption of this kind of systems.

Abstract Supporting group decision‐making when the decision makers are spread around the world is a complex process. The mechanisms of automated negotiation, such as argumentation, can be used in Ubiquitous Group Decision Support Systems (UbiGDSS) to help decision makers find a solution based on their preferences. However, the decision‐making process is much more than just a simple criteria and alternative analysis. There are many cognitive and affective issues that affect the outcome, and these issues should not be ignored; otherwise, the quality of the decision could be compromised. In this paper, we detail an UbiGDSS architecture and explore 2 cognitive and affective methods that are essential to the group decision‐making process. We explain how agents can reason about self‐expertise and other decision makers' credibility, and how agents can verify and react to tendencies throughout the decision‐making process. We intend agents to achieve higher quality and more consensual decisions. In any simulation environment that we tested, agents that analysed credibility, expertise, and/or analysed tendencies always achieved a higher consensus compared to agents that used neither of the proposed methods. Likewise, agents that used neither of the proposed methods or only performed tendencies analysis obtained the worst average satisfaction levels for each simulation environment.

Supporting group decision-making in ubiquitous contexts is a complex task that must deal with a large amount of factors to succeed. Here we propose an approach for an intelligent negotiation model to support the group decision-making process specifically designed for ubiquitous contexts. Our approach can be used by researchers that intend to include arguments, complex algorithms, and agents’ modeling in a negotiation model. It uses a social networking logic due to the type of communication employed by the agents and it intends to support the ubiquitous group decision-making process in a similar way to the real process, which simultaneously preserves the amount and quality of intelligence generated in face-to-face meetings. We propose a new look into this problem by considering and defining strategies to deal with important points such as the type of attributes in the multicriterion problems, agents’ reasoning, and intelligent dialogues.