Persuasive E-Health Design for Behavior Change

At a time, in which people are more and more suffering from lifestyle-related diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, or obesity, changing health behavior and preserving a healthy lifestyle are salient factors of any public health effort. Hence, research on predictors and pathways of health behavior change is increasingly important. Following this, new ways of implementing behavior change interventions become possible based on internet technologies, allowing for technological approaches fostering behavior change. Such union of media informatics and psychology is denoted as persuasive design and refers to all technological intervention components, which help people to take, regularly use and re-take (after relapses into unwanted behavior) interventions. Along this trend, the present chapter introduces (1) theories of health behavior change and summarizes (2) present persuasive design approaches, thereby ending with (3) future directions in the field.