Exploring the Role of Common Model of Cognition in Designing Adaptive Coaching Interactions for Health Behavior Change

TL;DR

This paper presents PARCoach, an adaptive coaching system based on the common model of cognition, designed to support health behavior change through personalized interactions, with positive results from a 4-week user study.

Contribution

It introduces PARCoach, a novel interactive system that applies the common model of cognition to design effective health coaching interactions.

Findings

PARCoach effectively supports health goal setting and behavior tracking.

Participants showed positive behavior change after using PARCoach.

The CMC framework is validated as useful for designing behavior change systems.

Abstract

Our research aims to develop intelligent collaborative agents that are human-aware - they can model, learn, and reason about their human partner's physiological, cognitive, and affective states. In this paper, we study how adaptive coaching interactions can be designed to help people develop sustainable healthy behaviors. We leverage the common model of cognition - CMC [26] - as a framework for unifying several behavior change theories that are known to be useful in human-human coaching. We motivate a set of interactive system desiderata based on the CMC-based view of behavior change. Then, we propose PARCoach - an interactive system that addresses the desiderata. PARCoach helps a trainee pick a relevant health goal, set an implementation intention, and track their behavior. During this process, the trainee identifies a specific goal-directed behavior as well as the situational context in which they will perform it. PARCcoach uses this information to send notifications to the trainee, reminding them of their chosen behavior and the context. We report the results from a 4-week deployment with 60 participants. Our results support the CMC-based view of behavior change and demonstrate that the desiderata for proposed interactive system design is useful in producing behavior change.