Assessing behavioral responses in persuasive ubiquitous systems

Existing telehealth systems do not perform as effectively as would be expected due to their asymmetric focus on sensing and monitoring with little support or assurance to affecting or altering behaviors. Many people, especially the elderly, are resistant to change. Such resistance diminishes the efficacy of telehealth systems. Research and supportive technology for intervention and behavior alteration is urgently needed. In response, we developed the Action-based Behavior Model (ABM) that promotes persuasion and enables persuasive telehealth. However, ABM requires an assessment of user behavior responsiveness and compliance to cyber influence. There are many challenging problems that must be overcome to enable such assessment. In this paper, we propose Assess Tree (AT) as a methodology for domain specific behavior assessment under ABM. We present AT and report on preliminary validation. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg