Persuasive Technology

Persuasive Technology (PT) is a vibrant interdisciplinary research field, focusing on the design, development and evaluation of interactive technologies aimed at changing people’s attitudes or behaviors through persuasion and social influence, but not through coercion or deception.

The 12th international conference on Persuasive Technologies will be hosted by the University of Twente, The Netherlands, but will be held on the other side of the country, in the beautiful city of Amsterdam. The previous successful conferences have been organized in Salzburg, Chicago, Padua, Sydney, Linköping, Columbus, Copenhagen, Claremont, Oulu, Palo Alto, and Eindhoven.

The conference will bring together researchers and practitioners from industry and academia who are working in the field of persuasive technologies. As a community we aim at enriching people’s lives in various domains – e.g., health, safety, and the environment – by supporting their personal goals to change their behavior.

Persuasive technology and behavior change support systems provide means of improving healthcare via co-creation with the end-users (caregivers, caretakers, family carers) and involved stakeholders (decision makers, policymakers and industrial organizations). Persuasiveness in healthcare can be achieved through the design of empathic technologies, adaptive to personalities and tailored to individual needs and skills, through mobile devices and ambient technologies. Persuasive strategies can be applied in empathic and person-adaptive designs for health to create trust, user-engagement and adherence. This year the conference builds bridges between persuasion and personalized healthcare via empathic, user-adaptive engaging technology, real-time data collection and smart evaluations to fit the users and the context. If you are a researcher or practitioner who works on designing, developing, evaluating or implementing persuasive technologies for health or if you are studying Big Data, sensor technologies for monitoring, personalized feedback and coaching, mHealth, data visualizations, serious gaming or social media, this is the perfect time to participate in the conference.

After more than a decade, the field of Persuasive Technology is reaching maturity. Nevertheless, at this moment an important remaining step is to further integrate insights from social science and technological disciplines from multiple angles. In addition to focusing on technology as a means to address social issues in various domains – a dominant perspective in PT research – a relatively novel, but promising way would be to focus on technology as a means to study interactions between humans and PT (e.g., how can sensor technology be used to evaluate PT interventions?).

We welcome a wide diversity of papers. Papers eligible for acceptance may address the application of PT in different domains (e.g., health, safety, …), examine the specific psychological mechanisms that positively or negatively influence PT effectiveness (e.g., habits, reciprocity, social comparison), focus on technology that provides input to persuasion attempts (e.g., sensors, monitoring, …), or emphasize methodology (for design, evaluation, implementation, …). Whatever the focus, we especially welcome papers that focus on technology as a means to study interactions between humans and PT, are grounded in relevant and up-to-date theory, transcend mere showcasing of applications, and address the generalizability of results.

The list below provides some additional examples (in no particular order); eligible papers are not limited to these specific examples.

Domains

• Safety
• Personalized healthcare (e.g. health, wellbeing, happiness)
• Personalized medicine
• Healthy environments
• Sustainable environment
• Persuasive wellbeing
• Persuasive cities
• eLearning and training
• Marketing and e-commerce

Technological and design perspective

• Big data systems
• Sensing technology
• Early warning systems
• Intelligent systems
• Smart environments
• Connected devices (Internet of Things)
• Design of feedback
• Multimodal interaction
• Persuasive systems, interfaces, visualization
• Socially influencing systems
• Computer-supported influence
• Tailored, persuasive, and personalized systems
• Mobile, pervasive and ubiquitous persuasion

Methodology

• Design methodologies
• Behavior change support systems design
• Experiments
• Big data methodologies
• Gamification
• Implementation
• Evaluation and validation
• Valorization
• Machine learning
• (Ecological) monitoring
• Feedback
• Coaching
• Persuasion through gamification

Theory

• Mass persuasion and interactive technologies
• Cognition and persuasive technology
• Cultural influences
• Humanizing and/or de-humanizing effects of persuasive technology
• Unconscious processes
• Habits and habit change
• Social practices
• Cultural values
• Reciprocity
• Competition, social comparison
• HCI issues

Miscellaneous

• Unexpected effects of PT
• Disruptive technology
• Persuasive backfiring
• Peripheral interaction
• Slow technology

In case you have any questions, please contact us:
info@persuasivetechnology.eu.