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Leveraging Social Norms and Implementation Intentions for Better Health

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Smart Health (ICSH 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10347))

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Abstract

One in eleven adults worldwide suffers from diabetes, and the disease accounts for 12% of global health expenditure(http://www.idf.org/about-diabetes/facts-figures). Although self-management and monitoring are critical for general control of the disease and for preventing diabetes-related complications, most patients fail to adhere to self-management regimens. We study what type of external intervention will amplify the self-monitoring frequency of Type-2 diabetes (T2d) patients. We conducted a randomized field experiment on a mobile health application with more than 500 T2d patients, and tested two well-known mechanisms for behavior change: social norms, and implementation intentions. Further, we combined social norms and implementation intentions and tested whether these two mechanisms can complement each other. Our results show that individuals who receive a message containing both social norms and implementation intentions perform the best in regard to self-monitoring. Our research paves the way to further investigate how different mechanisms may be combined to help users’ form healthy habits.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Mobile benchmark Q3 2016 by “adjust” https://www.adjust.com/downloads/resources/mobile-benchmarks-q3-2016.pdf.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Maryland, College Park, USA

    Che-Wei Liu, Weiguang Wang, Guodong (Gordon) Gao & Ritu Agarwal

Authors
  1. Che-Wei Liu
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  2. Weiguang Wang
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  3. Guodong (Gordon) Gao
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  4. Ritu Agarwal
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Che-Wei Liu , Weiguang Wang , Guodong (Gordon) Gao or Ritu Agarwal .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA

    Hsinchun Chen

  2. University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA

    Daniel Dajun Zeng

  3. Department of Management Information System, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA

    Elena Karahanna

  4. University of Texas, Richardson, Texas, USA

    Indranil Bardhan

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Liu, CW., Wang, W., Gao, G.(., Agarwal, R. (2017). Leveraging Social Norms and Implementation Intentions for Better Health. In: Chen, H., Zeng, D., Karahanna, E., Bardhan, I. (eds) Smart Health. ICSH 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10347. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67964-8_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67964-8_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-67963-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-67964-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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