Towards an Adaptive Behavior Change Game Based on User-Tailored and Context-Aware Interventions

Persuasive technologies represent a great opportunity to provide interventions capable of leading people to behavior change in the health and wellness domain. However, changing behavior is a difficult process and these technologies often adopt a one-size-fits-All approach, also scarcely considering the meanings that users may attribute to the process of change. In this sense, behavior change requires more personalized and meaningful interventions to bring more effective outcomes. This goal may be achieved with the combination of adaptive systems, which can adapt on the basis of a user model and some contextual data, and video games, which can make the process of change more enjoyable and meaningful. To this aim, we propose a mobile-based adaptive Behavior Change Game that promotes positive habits by personalizing its gameplay on the basis of a comprehensive user model, containing information about her habits, behavior and context collected through smart devices. We believe that adapting the game on the basis of the real-world user s behaviors may give the feeling that the behavior change in the real world is a game itself, intertwining the real and the virtual worlds and increasing the motivation to change.