The study of persuasive techniques associated with technology is an important part of behavioral change research in information systems. Applied in areas such as education and healthcare, persuasive messages usually contain guidelines the users must follow in order to reach the targeted new behavior. We are studying the use of storytelling and virtual reality as persuasive methods. Those two techniques appear in several studies, together or separately. We base our study on an analysis of the current literature and a two steps survey combining 528 participants with valid responses. A factor analysis allowed us to develop a model measuring the persuasive effectiveness of storytelling via virtual narrator. This model is based on 31 items and 5 components. In addition, we are also presenting a questionnaire, with specific scoring guidelines, which can be used in any study using storytelling via virtual entity as mean of persuasion.

The ageing of the global population is creating a crisis in chronic disease management. In the USA, 29 million people (or 9.3% of the population) suffer from the chronic disease of diabetes; according to the WHO, globally around 200 million people are diabetic. Left unchecked, diabetes can lead to acute and long-term complications and ultimately death. Diabetes prevalence tends to be the highest among those aged 65 and older (nearly 20.6%), a population which often lacks the cognitive resources to deal with the daily self-management regimens. In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of an Internet-of-Things (IoT) and wireless sensor system which patients use in their own homes to capture daily activity, an important component in diabetes management. Following Fogg’s 2009 persuasion theory, we mine the activity data and provide motivational messages to the subjects with the intention of changing their activity and dietary behaviour. We introduce a novel idea called “persuasive sensing” and report results from two home implementations that show exciting promise. With the captured home monitoring data, we also develop analytic models that can predict blood glucose levels for the next day with an accuracy of 94%. We conclude with lessons learned from these two home case studies and explore design principles for creating novel IoT systems.

The number of elderly people over 60-year old is expected to reach 2 billion by 2050. With age people experience cognitive decline. While exercises are known to help, one of the age-associated issues is non-adherence. With the increasing adoption of technology by elderly, mobile devices become a good channel to deliver a persuasive solution. In this paper, we discuss the design and evaluation of Adherence Booster (AdBo). AdBo consists of a mobile app that encourages, monitors progress, and guides the elderly through appropriate daily exercises, short-term memory test to continuously measure any cognitive improvement, and a messaging system that reminds the elderly to exercise on a daily basis. AdBo is designed to overcome four identified barriers to adherence which are self-efficacy, outcome expectations, functional decline, and memory decline. The results of a randomized control trial evaluation show that AdBo was successful in boosting the elderly adherence, and elderly friendly exercises have positive effect on short memory performance.!

MyHeart is a telehealth system designed to bridge the current gap in the Congestive Heart Failure care continuum that occurs when the patient transitions from the hospital to the home environment. The system uses wireless health devices and a mobile application on the patient's end, a rule-based expert system, and a dashboard on the clinician's end to facilitate the exchange of information pertaining to vitals, symptoms, and health risk. The system also sends messages to patients that aim to encourage self-care as per Fogg's behavior model. An experiment to evaluate MyHeart is currently underway at Loma Linda University Medical Center and encouraging initial findings are reported.

Diabetes is a common but serious chronic disease. Nearly 8% of Americans who are aged 65 and older (about 10.9 million) suffer from this deadly disease. Self-management of this disease is possible, yet the older population lack knowledge, have denial and often lack motivation to do so. Recently we have demonstrated sensor-based network architecture within the home to monitor daily activities and biological vital parameters [25]. The data is mined to find patterns and abnormal values. Through daily text messages that are sent to the subjects, we have achieved to influence behavior change using persuasive principles. In this paper, we analyze the daily data and demonstrate that a model to profile the subject's daily behavior is possible using Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). Such a profiling has the advantage of knowing the situations, when the subject's daily activity deviates from its “normal profile”, which may be a possible indication of an onset of some health condition or disease. Lastly we develop an ANN based model to predict blood sugar level based on previous day's activity and diet intake. Such a model can be used to help a subject with high blood sugar to adjust daily activity to reach a target blood sugar level and also gives a care-giver advance notice to intervene in adverse situations.

While our Y2K worries about old computers "retiring" at midnight captured the television and news media attention, a more significant "old age" phenomenon snuck onto the scene with hardly a headline: the dawn of the age of the aged. (1) The over burdened health care system will face a worldwide wave of retirees who will live longer, cost more to treat, and demand new goods and services to help them stay healthy, active, and independent. Research in persuasive technologies and the associated usage of a computing system, device, or application intentionally designed to change a person's attitude or behavior in a predetermined way is showing the potential to assist in improving healthy living, reduce the costs on the health care system, and allow the aged to maintain a more independent life. This article gives a deeper insight into the evolution of persuasive technologies and presents a framework that can guide a researcher or practitioner in comprehending more effectively the work being done in this novel research field. It also provides categories of domains within health care in which these technologies are used and surveys exemplars from published literature. The article's goal is to provide greater understanding by addressing the challenges that lie ahead for all key stakeholders that design and/or use persuasive technologies in health care.

There has been a gigantic shift from a product based economy to one based on services, specifically digital services. From every indication it is likely to be more than a passing fad and the changes these emerging digital services represent will continue to transform commerce and have yet to reach market saturation. Digital services are being designed for and offered to users, yet very little is known about the design process that goes behind these developments. Is there a science behind designing digital services? By examining 12 leading digital services, we have developed a design taxonomy to be able to classify and contrast digital services. What emerged in the taxonomy were two broad dimensions; a set of fundamental design objectives and a set of fundamental service provider objectives. This paper concludes with an application of the proposed taxonomy to three leading digital services. We hope that the proposed taxonomy will be useful in understanding the science behind the design of digital services.

The next generation of enterprise networks is undergoing major changes as a plethora of new architectures, applications, and services begin to roll out within businesses. In general, the world of voice/telephony, video, and data are "converging" into a global communications network. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, the design, analysis, and performance of a session initiation protocol (SIP)-based videoconferencing desktop client, which has been developed and deployed over Internet2, is presented. Second, a guideline for managing SIP-based services to be deployed within enterprises, which addresses several challenges in each layer, such as network address translator (NAT)/FW issues, directory service integration issues, and interoperability issues, is proposed. Several detailed experimental results related to interoperability and conformance that were carried out are presented. Findings of extensive SIP/NAT traversal analysis through network traffic measurements are reported. The lessons learned from both the design of a new SIP-based voice/video client, as well as management challenges with enterprise deployment are highlighted.

As mobile users run applications over widely different wireless and mobile networks, support for multicasting is an even bigger challenge. In this paper, we investigate several architectural issues that we feel will facilitate the multicast communications across different types of wireless networks.

If the reliability provided by the network is lower than that requested by the application, the error and flow control systems in the end nodes must make up for the difference. While most applications use retransmission based schemes to recover lost data, ARQ based closed loop techniques may not be suitable for many new applications. Time sensitive information requiring no loss of data would constitute a major segment of the emerging traffic (interactive web, videophones, CSCW) that typically employ forward error correction (FEC) codes. Such codes send redundant information which help to recover lost data without retransmission. The paper shows that just plain FEC is not enough when one considers the fragmentation effects that take place when legacy networks interwork with ATM. Simple yet powerful buffer management techniques can yield higher throughput, thereby reducing block loss rates. A combination of a gatekeeping operation along with janitor routine that cleans up the buffer to preserve frames on an end to end basis is proposed. A simulation study demonstrates positive results. The proposed schemes even point towards efficient sizing of ATM switch buffers which guarantee no loss transport of real time information.

Dynamic congestion control strategies for supporting real-time multimedia applications in high-speed integrated asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks are considered. Several traffic types including voice, video and multimedia data are expected to co-exist in future broadband integrated services digital network (B-ISDN). They are classified according to their distinct needs based on bandwidth, delay or delay-jitter and cell-loss rates. The significant merits that congestion control schemes in high-speed networks should have, in sharp contrast to conventional flow-based schemes, are identified. It is observed that a multilevel congestion control approach is essential to provide quality of service (QOS) guarantees in multimedia networks. A new service mechanism known as fast burst sharing is discussed. It has the ability to transport bursts of certain sessions without fragmenting them, thereby preserving integrity of user talkspurt, often desired in a bursty traffic environment. A number of dynamic cell marking schemes are proposed as effective traffic-compliance testing algorithms.

A hierarchical broadcasting technique in very large arbitrary networks which achieves near optimal cost and time measures is proposed. The network is partitioned into hierarchical clusters which are interconnected with each other through gate nodes. The approach is based on using a fully distributed minimum spanning tree algorithm within the gate-node network while achieving time optimal broadcasting within the local clusters by formulating the problem as finding maximum matching in constrained bipartite graphs. Extensive simulation results are presented which show the tradeoff between the two conflicting performance criteria.>