The Persuasive technologies And Social Computing Lab (PASCL) carries out research that benefits individuals and the society in general. We work on building technologies that can influence people to make positive behaviour change such as shopping for healthy foods, learning a concept, adopting sustainable behaviour, or being more active. We also use user generated content in social media to understand people's behaviour with the aim of positively influencing them.
List of recent publications
Analysis of Serious Games for Nutrition Using NLP Techniques
Analysis of Serious Games for Nutrition Using NLP Techniques
Serious games, which are games that are designed not just for entertainment, are commonly used to teach important concepts such as a new language, or other specific subjects such as healthy nutrition. Serious games can be a fun and interactive way to educate people about healthy eating habits which can go a long way to address health challenges such as obesity. These games are typically available to users on the app store such as the Google Play Store where users can also write reviews based on their experience playing the game. The reviews are a rich source of information and feedback for game developers and other stakeholders. Analyzing the sentiments and emotions expressed in such reviews can help developers gain insights into how players perceive a game’s effectiveness in achieving its goals and aims. This can aid the development of future releases of the game where issues are fixed and improvements made. To contribute to research in this area, ten games are analyzed for sentiments and emotions using Natural Language Processing techniques. Our results show that all but one of the games have more positive sentiments than negative sentiments. In addition, some of the popular emotions we identified include admiration, approval, amusement, and love. To support game designers and other stakeholders in gaining useful insights from our results, we developed a tool in the form of an interactive web page where users can view the sentiments and emotions expressed in the reviews of each game including the raw reviews. This can help game designers and other stakeholders explore reviews of users in one place.
Age Differences in the Spread of Misinformation Online
Age Differences in the Spread of Misinformation Online
Research in the area of misinformation online has identified various factors as the reason why people spread misinformation online such as availability of technology, entertainment, ignorance, to pass time, altruism etc. However, how these factors differ from one age group to another is not known. Research also suggests that people of different generations or age groups behave differently and are influenced differently. While people of each age range will have differences among them, they will likely behave similarly compared to people of other age groups. Therefore, in determining why people spread misinformation online, it is important to investigate any differences based on the age groups of online users. This will ensure that interventions designed to curb the spread of misinformation can be tailored to people based on their age. To contribute to research in the area of determining why people of different age ranges spread misinformation online, we surveyed 113 social media users of varying age groups. Our results show that the younger participants between 18 and 34 years are more likely to spread misinformation due to the availability of technology, entertainment, the need to pass time, the fear of missing out, peer pressure and trust in people online.
Serious Games for Healthy Nutrition. A Systematic Literature Review
Serious Games for Healthy Nutrition. A Systematic Literature Review
Research indicates that the two main causes of being overweight and obese are living a sedentary lifestyle and unhealthy eating habits. Influencing people to be active and exercise is an active research area that has resulted in the development of several games both commercially available and for free. The area of influencing people to develop healthy eating habits, on the other hand, still has room for growth. In the current paper, I review existing serious games for healthy nutrition over the past five years and summarize the main findings based on three main themes: the design and development of the game, the evaluation of the game, and the findings from the evaluation. My results indicate that most games are designed in collaboration with a team of experts such as nutritionists, psychologists, HCI designers, and software developers. In addition, most of the games for kids are web-based while most of those for adults are mobile-based. Most games used a self-report approach to evaluation which was carried out over a range of period of 30 minutes to 90 days with between 10 to 531 participants. There were mixed results from the evaluations with most games partially achieving their aim. I conclude by suggesting guidelines for developing serious games for influencing healthy nutrition.
A Review of the Use of Persuasive Technologies to Influence Sustainable Behaviour
A Review of the Use of Persuasive Technologies to Influence Sustainable Behaviour
Persuasive technologies are interactive systems that are designed to influence people to change their attitudes or behaviours. Persuasive technologies have been used successfully in several domains including health to make people exercise more, shopping to make people buy specific products, and social media to make people contribute better content. In the area of sustainability, its use is not well documented. To contribute to the use of persuasive technologies in sustainability, this paper carries out a literature review of published articles in the area in the past five years and summarizes the main findings based on three main themes: the design and development of the technology to make it adaptive to users, the evaluation of the technology, and the findings from the evaluation. Our results suggest that most persuasive technologies are developed as mobile applications, IoT devices or serious games and the most common behaviour change targeted by the persuasive technologies in this domain are energy conservation and sustainable food management. The most common persuasive strategies that are used are rewards, suggestions and self-monitoring. In terms of evaluation, a selfreported evaluation method was applied by most authors. While the range of evaluation of the developed persuasive technologies was between one hour and one year, the number of recruited participants ranged from two to over nine hundred. The findings from the evaluation were mostly mixed with several authors reporting positive results (behaviour change) for some participants. Based on these results, we suggest considerations for the development of future persuasive technologies for sustainability.