Enduring Rewards: Supporting lifestyle change maintenance by dynamic personalized incentives.

Project summary

Recent large-scale population research showed that healthy lifestyle extends lifetime with six years and delays the onset of chronic diseases with nine years. Multiple interventions are available to help people achieve a healthier lifestyle which are successful in motivating people to initiate a behavioural change (BC) but often fail keep people aboard and maintain their change. The present project investigates and evaluates how design can support motivation for a BC maintenance.

Incentives, e.g. discounts, are proven motivators to initiate BC and form the core of the Dutch nationwide BENEFIT program that will form the basis of the project. We expect that incentives can support BC maintenance as well if they are personalized. We propose the four strategies of personalisation: 1) Adapt incentive–type, -quantity, and –moment to BC stage; 2) Introduce personal health feedback as motivator; 3) Personalise incentives to user’s engagement profile; and 4) Change system-initiated incentives into user-initiated incentives. We will investigate theory, effect, and gamified eHealth design means of these strategies in two testbeds consisting of programs that are successful in BC initiation but not yet in BC maintenance. These are the BOX, a telemedicine project for CVD patients facilitating healthy lifestyle, and Lekker Fit!, a project to stimulate healthy lifestyle in adolescents. For these programs we will develop by means of co-creative Research-through-Design methods eHealth demonstrators that will be evaluated on their 6-month behavioural maintenance effect.

The project results in eHealth design tools for behavioural change maintenance which are based on evaluated demonstrators and psychological theory.