The power of feedback.

NUDGE: IMPROVING DECISIONS ABOUT HEALTH, WEALTH, AND HAPPINESS by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein Penguin Books, 2009, 312 pp, ISBN 978-0-14-311526-7This book is best described formally as a general explanation of and advocacy for libertarian paternalism, a term coined by the authors in earlier publications. Informally, it is about how leaders, systems, organizations, and governments can nudge people to do the things the nudgers want and need done for the betterment of the nudgees, or of society. It is paternalism in the sense that "it is legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people's behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier, and better", (p. 5) It is libertarian in that "people should be free to do what they like - and to opt out of undesirable arrangements if they want to do so", (p. 5) The built-in possibility of opting out or making a different choice preserves freedom of choice even though people's behavior has been influenced by the nature of the presentation of the information or by the structure of the decisionmaking system. I had never heard of libertarian paternalism before reading this book, and I now find it fascinating.Written for a general audience, this book contains mostly social and behavioral science theory and models, but there is considerable discussion of structure and process that has roots in mathematical and quantitative modeling. One of the main applications of this social system is economic choice in investing, selecting and purchasing products and services, systems of taxes, banking (mortgages, borrowing, savings), and retirement systems. Other quantitative social choice systems discussed include environmental effects, health care plans, gambling, and organ donations. Softer issues that are also subject to a nudge-based approach are marriage, education, eating, drinking, smoking, influence, spread of information, and politics. There is something in this book for everyone.The basis for this libertarian paternalism concept is in the social theory called "science of choice", the study of the design and implementation of influence systems on various kinds of people. The terms Econs and Humans, are used to refer to people with either considerable or little rational decision-making talent, respectively. The various libertarian paternalism concepts and systems presented are tested and compared in light of these two types of people. Two foundational issues that this book has in common with another book, Network of Echoes: Imitation, Innovation and Invisible Leaders, that was also reviewed for this issue of the Journal are that 1 ) there are two modes of thinking (or components of the brain) - an automatic (intuitive) process and a reflective (rational) process and 2) the need for conformity and the desire for imitation are powerful forces in human behavior. …

Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Service robots and artificial intelligence promise to increase productivity and reduce costs, prompting substantial growth in sales of service robots and research dedicated to understanding their i...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/02642069.2019.1672666

Service robot implementation: a theoretical framework and research agenda

Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed the world and the relationships among humans as the learning capabilities of machines have allowed for a new means of communication between humans and machines. In the field of health, there is much interest in new technologies that help to improve and automate services in hospitals. This article aims to explore the literature related to conversational agents applied to health care, searching for definitions, patterns, methods, architectures, and data types. Furthermore, this work identifies an agent application taxonomy, current challenges, and research gaps. In this work, we use a systematic literature review approach. We guide and refine this study and the research questions by applying Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome, and Context (PICOC) criteria. The present study investigated approximately 4145 articles involving conversational agents in health published over the last ten years. In this context, we finally selected 40 articles based on their approaches and objectives as related to our main subject. As a result, we developed a taxonomy, identified the main challenges in the field, and defined the main types of dialog and contexts related to conversational agents in health. These results contributed to discussions regarding conversational health agents, and highlighted some research gaps for future study.

Survey of conversational agents in health

ChatGPT for good? On opportunities and challenges of large language models for education

In this paper, we present a system that acts as an automatic facilitator by supporting the flow of communication in a group conversation activity. The system monitors the group members' non-verbal behavior and promotes balanced participation, giving targeted directives to the participants through peripheral displays. We describe an initial study to compare two ways of influencing participantsfi social dynamics: overt directives, explicit recommendations of social actions displayed in the form of text; or subtle directives, where the same recommendations are provided in an implicit manner. Our study indicates that, when the participants understand how the implicit messages work, the subtle facilitation is regarded as more useful than the overt one and it is considered to more positively influence the group behavior.

Overt or subtle? Supporting group conversations with automatically targeted directives

Providing a common place for the civil society to gather and discuss topics of mutual interest is a growing challenge for social and collaborative computing. Web-based tools for civic engagement, while promising, are still disconnected from meaningful physical locations where citizens usually meet and might limit the involvement of a considerable portion of the citizen population. We propose a system, Agora2.0, designed to recover the useful function that public places have had in the past in promoting and regulating citizens' participation in public decisions. Agora2.0 is inspired by the old concept of the Greek agora, or public square. It is composed of an onsite interactive public display and an online site. We present the project, the analysis of the requirements, the system prototype, and its evaluation during deployments in a university and in a public relations office of a European city.

Agora2.0: enhancing civic participation through a public display

Building conversational agents have many technical, design and linguistic challenges. Other more complex elements include using emotionally intelligent conversational agent to build trust with the individuals. In this chapter, we introduce the nature of conversational user interfaces (CUIs) for health and describe UX design principles informed by a systematic literature review of relevant research works. We analyze scientific literature in conversational interfaces and chatterbots, providing a survey of major studies and describing UX design principles and interaction patterns.

Designing for Health Chatbots

The recent rise of conversational interfaces have made it possible to integrate this technology into various domains, among which is health Dialogue systems and conversational agents can bring a lot into healthcare to reduce cost, increase efficiency and provide continuing care, albeit its infancy and complexity about building natural dialogues However, the design guidelines to design dialogues for conversational agents are usually based on common knowledge, and less frequently on empirical evidence For example, the use of emojis in conversational agent dialogues is still a debated issue, and the added value of adding such graphical elements is mainly anecdotal In this work, we present an empirical study comparing users feedback when interacting with chatbot applications that use different dialogue styles, ie, plain text or text with emoji, when asking different health related questions The analysis found that when participants had to score an interaction with a chatbot that asks personal questions on their mental wellbeing, they rated the interaction with higher scores with respect to enjoyment, attitude and confidence Differently, participants rated with lower scores a chatbot that uses emojis when asking information on their physical wellbeing compared to a dialogue with plain text We believe this work can contribute to the research on integrating conversational agents in the health and wellbeing context and can serve as a guidance in the design and development of interfaces for text-based dialogue systems

/pdf/the-effect-of-emojis-when-interacting-with-conversational-34anc08q1i.pdf

The Effect of Emojis when interacting with Conversational Interface Assisted Health Coaching System

In this paper, we present a playful digital activity for primary school classrooms that promotes sustainable and active mobility by leveraging the daily journey to school into a collaborative educational experience. In the class game, stretches of distance travelled in a sustainable way by each child contributes to the advancement of the whole school on a collective virtual trip. During the trip, several virtual stops are associated with the discovery of playful learning material. The approach has been evaluated in a primary school with 87 pupils and 6 teachers actively involved in the learning activity for 12 continuous weeks. The findings from the questionnaires with parents and the interviews with teachers show a positive effect in terms of children's behavioural change as well as educational value. Indications on the use of class and school collaborative gamification activities for supporting sustainable behavioural change are discussed.

Gianluca Schiavo

Papers

Overt or subtle? Supporting group conversations with automatically targeted directives

Agora2.0: enhancing civic participation through a public display

Designing for Health Chatbots

The Effect of Emojis when interacting with Conversational Interface Assisted Health Coaching System

Exploring the world through small green steps: improving sustainable school transportation with a game-based learning interface