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Persuasive technology for overcoming food cravings and improving snack choices

Published: 26 April 2014 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    A central challenge in weight management is the difficulty of overcoming desires for excessive and unhealthy food. Yet, studies show that when people are able to resist their desires for unhealthy choices, they experience pride and satisfaction. In order to alleviate the former and support the latter, we designed, implemented and tested a mobile application for improving snacking behavior. Our application delivers a food craving reduction intervention at the moment of need and allows users to track how often they successfully resisted cravings. Our craving reduction intervention is based on recent research that shows that food cravings can be reduced through imagery techniques. We conducted a week-long evaluation of our application, comparing the effectiveness of our application to a basic tracking application. We found that our imagery application significantly reduced both overall snacking and unhealthy snacking compared to a simple snack-tracking application.

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    Cited By

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    • (2024)Hicclip: Sonification of Augmented Eating Sounds to Intervene Snacking BehaviorsProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661532(1372-1384)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
    • (2024)Persuasive strategies and emotional states: towards designing personalized and emotion-adaptive persuasive systemsUser Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction10.1007/s11257-023-09390-xOnline publication date: 5-Mar-2024
    • (2023)Persuasive Strategies and Emotional States: Towards Emotion-Adaptive Persuasive Technologies DesignPersuasive Technology10.1007/978-3-031-30933-5_14(215-233)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
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        cover image ACM Conferences
        CHI '14: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
        April 2014
        4206 pages
        ISBN:9781450324731
        DOI:10.1145/2556288
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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        Publication History

        Published: 26 April 2014

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        Author Tags

        1. behavior change
        2. mobile
        3. persuasive technologies
        4. user-centered design
        5. weight management
        6. wellness

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        CHI '14
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        CHI '14: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
        April 26 - May 1, 2014
        Ontario, Toronto, Canada

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        CHI '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 465 of 2,043 submissions, 23%;
        Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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        • (2024)Hicclip: Sonification of Augmented Eating Sounds to Intervene Snacking BehaviorsProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661532(1372-1384)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
        • (2024)Persuasive strategies and emotional states: towards designing personalized and emotion-adaptive persuasive systemsUser Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction10.1007/s11257-023-09390-xOnline publication date: 5-Mar-2024
        • (2023)Persuasive Strategies and Emotional States: Towards Emotion-Adaptive Persuasive Technologies DesignPersuasive Technology10.1007/978-3-031-30933-5_14(215-233)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
        • (2022)Socially-Oriented Persuasive Game to Promote Disease Awareness and PreventionHuman Behavior and Emerging Technologies10.1155/2022/94035782022(1-17)Online publication date: 30-Jun-2022
        • (2022)Personalizing Persuasive Principles to Improve CredibilityProceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization10.1145/3503252.3534359(331-334)Online publication date: 4-Jul-2022
        • (2022)Exploring the effectiveness of persuasive games for disease prevention and awareness and the impact of tailoring to the stages of changeHuman–Computer Interaction10.1080/07370024.2022.205785838:5-6(459-494)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2022
        • (2022)Persuasive strategy implementation choices and their effectiveness: towards personalised persuasive systemsBehaviour & Information Technology10.1080/0144929X.2022.211261242:13(2176-2209)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2022
        • (2022)Cognitive Defusion as Strategy to Reduce the Intensity of Craving Episodes and Improve Eating BehaviorThe Spanish Journal of Psychology10.1017/SJP.2021.4725Online publication date: 5-Jan-2022
        • (2022)Smartphones in Personal Informatics: A Framework for Self-Tracking Research with Mobile SensingDigital Phenotyping and Mobile Sensing10.1007/978-3-030-98546-2_6(77-104)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2022
        • (2021)How Cultural Norms Influence Persuasive Design: A Study on Chinese Food Journaling AppsProceedings of the 2021 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3461778.3462142(619-637)Online publication date: 28-Jun-2021
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