Digital Behaviour Change Intervention: Personalizing Persuasive Games for Wellbeing

数字行为改变干预(也称为劝说技术)鼓励人们改变他们的态度和行为。我的研究项目旨在调查游戏化劝说干预的设计，作为预防心理健康问题和改善学生群体主观幸福感的积极反应。我特别感兴趣的是：1)鼓励学生参与能带来快乐的积极活动；2)使说服策略适应不同的个性、积极的压力源、态度和过去的行为。学生在学业生涯中不断地暴露在各种压力源之下，这些压力源会引发高度的心理困扰、抑郁、焦虑和孤独。此外，经历过心理健康问题的学生可能会对接受机构和当地从业者的护理或寻求支持感到紧张。这可能会导致许多健康并发症，并对学生的信心、学习成绩和主观幸福感产生重大影响。因此，至关重要的是，学生在整个学术旅程中都能得到适合他们需求的适当支持。劝说技术可以激励、塑造和强化有益的行为，帮助个人减少风险因素或应激源的负面影响，并增强保护因素的效果。因此，数字行为改变干预措施可以促进预防模式的整合，从而能够及早发现症状并使更多的人能够远程获得支持。使用说服性技术来提高幸福感将减少精神卫生保健提供者和支持服务的时间成本和财务支出，并鼓励主动性，赋予个人权力，促进自我照顾和提高自我管理技能。受积极心理学研究的启发，我的博士项目涉及到一种游戏化说服干预的算法设计，鼓励参与积极的活动。我的主要工作重点是制定有说服力的策略，以激励学生参与有意义、可实现和愉快的活动，增加幸福感，并支持学生更有效地管理压力源。我的项目还包括执行用户研究(定性和定量)，以告知和验证这些算法，以及受控实验，以评估游戏化干预的感知和实际效果。虽然数字行为改变干预可以使用各种方法来提供，但我选择专注于具有说服力的游戏，因为它们具有强大的动机吸引力。说服性游戏的互动性很强，需要参与者积极参与，这可以提高干预的情绪质量，并有助于激励用户保持参与度。因此，近年来，越来越多的说服性游戏被开发出来，作为激励更健康行为的新解决方案，例如鼓励体育活动和均衡营养。尽管人们对说服性游戏的兴趣与日俱增，但仍有必要进一步研究它们在幸福领域的应用，以及提高幸福感的游戏设计和个性化的不同方面。我的博士学位建立在说服性技术(包括游戏化)、智能用户界面、用户建模和个性化领域的工作基础上。这项工作的发现将对个性化和设计具有说服力的健康和健康技术产生影响。

Digital behaviour change interventions (also known as Persuasive Technology) encourage people to change their attitudes and behaviours. My research project aims to investigate the design of a gamified persuasive intervention as a proactive response for preventing mental health problems and improving subjective wellbeing in a student population. I am particularly interested in 1) encouraging students to engage in positive activities that induce happiness and 2) adapting persuasive strategies to different personalities, active stressors, attitudes and past behaviours. Students are continually exposed to a variety of stressors during their academic career, which can induce high levels of psychological distress, depression, anxiety and loneliness. Moreover, students who experience mental health problems might feel nervous about receiving care or seeking support from their institution and local practitioners. This can lead to numerous health complications and have a major influence on student confidence, academic performance and subjective wellbeing. It is, therefore, critical that students receive appropriate support, tailored to their needs, throughout their academic journey. Persuasive Technology can motivate, shape and reinforce beneficial behaviours, helping individuals to reduce the negative impact of risk factors or stressors and to enhance the effect of protective factors. Thus, digital behaviour change interventions can facilitate the integration of preventive models that would allow early detection of symptoms and enable a larger number of individuals to access support remotely. Using persuasive technology to promote wellbeing would reduce time costs and financial expenses for mental healthcare providers and support services, as well as encourage initiative, empower individuals, promote self-care and improve self-management skills.Inspired by research in positive psychology, my PhD project involves the design of algorithms for a gamified persuasive intervention that encourages engagement in positive activities. The main focus of my work is tailoring persuasive strategies for motivating student engagement in meaningful, achievable and enjoyable activities which increase happiness and support students in managing stressors more effectively. My project also involves performing user studies (both qualitative and quantitative) to inform and validate those algorithms, as well as controlled experiments to evaluate the perceived and actual effectiveness of the gamified intervention. While digital behaviour change interventions can be delivered using various approaches, I chose to focus on persuasive games due to their strong motivational pull. Persuasive games are very interactive and require active engagement from participants, which can increase the emotional quality of the intervention and contribute as an incentive to keep users engaged. As a result, an increasing number of persuasive games have been developed in recent years as novel solutions for motivating healthier behaviours, such as encouraging physical activity and balanced nutrition. Despite the growing interest in persuasive games, there remains a need for further research into their application in the wellbeing domain and the different aspects of design and personalisation of games which promote happiness. My PhD builds on work in the areas of Persuasive Technology (including Gamification), Intelligent User Interfaces, User Modelling and Personalisation. The findings of this work will have implications for the personalisation and design of persuasive technology for health and wellness.