Health Behavior Change in HCI: Trends, Patterns, and Opportunities

TL;DR

This paper systematically reviews HCI research on health behavior change, highlighting trends, gaps, and future opportunities, especially in physical activity, diverse populations, and evaluation methods.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of research patterns in HCI health interventions and offers suggestions for future work on game integration, social support, and AI applications.

Findings

Physical activity dominates research focus.

Adults are the primary participants, with less focus on children and elderly.

Lack of standardized evaluation methods for user experience.

Abstract

Unhealthy lifestyles could cause many chronic diseases, which bring patients and their families much burden. Research has shown the potential of digital technologies for supporting health behavior change to help us prevent these chronic diseases. The HCI community has contributed to the research on health behavior change for more than a decade. In this paper, we aim to explore the research trends and patterns of health behavior change in HCI. Our systematic review showed that physical activity drew much more attention than other behaviors. Most of the participants in the reviewed studies were adults, while children and the elderly were much less addressed. Also, we found there is a lack of standardized approaches to evaluating the user experience of interventions for health behavior change in HCI. Based on the reviewed studies, we provide suggestions and research opportunities on six topics, e.g., game integration, social support, and relevant AI application.