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Designing Persuasion: Health Technology for Low-Income African American Communities

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Persuasive Technology (PERSUASIVE 2007)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 4744))

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Abstract

In the United States, African Americans face a disproportionate amount of diet-related health problems. For example, African American adults are 1.6 times more likely to have diabetes than their Caucasian counterparts. Individuals in low-income communities may face a greater risk because they typically have less access to healthy foods. Due to the significant diet-related problems within the African American community, public health researchers call for approaches to health promotion that take into account the relationship between culture and dietary habits. In this paper, we discuss three important considerations for the design of technologies that address the diet-related health disparities in low-income African American communities. These considerations include designing for cultural relevancy, modeling health behavior, and encouraging healthy behavior through the use of social psychological theories of persuasion. We use a game design example to illustrate how each of these considerations can be incorporated into the development of new technology.

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Yvonne de Kort Wijnand IJsselsteijn Cees Midden Berry Eggen B. J. Fogg

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© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Grimes, A., Grinter, R.E. (2007). Designing Persuasion: Health Technology for Low-Income African American Communities. In: de Kort, Y., IJsselsteijn, W., Midden, C., Eggen, B., Fogg, B.J. (eds) Persuasive Technology. PERSUASIVE 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4744. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77006-0_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77006-0_4

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-77005-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-77006-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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