Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Aug 2, 2021
Open Peer Review Period: Aug 2, 2021 - Sep 27, 2021
Date Accepted: May 8, 2022
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Antifragile Behavior Change through Digital Health Behavior Change Interventions
ABSTRACT
Digital health behavior change interventions (DHBCIs) are popular and widely-accessible tools for helping people to pursue behavior change goals. However, their effectiveness tends to be low in real-world settings. Drawing from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s concept of antifragility, we introduce antifragile behavior change, a strategy that leverages user-specific characteristics to make the behavior change process more efficient. Next, we propose two principles for designing DHBCIs to support antifragile behavior change: first, DHBCIs should provide personalized guidance that accounts for user-specific circumstances and goals; second, DHBCIs should prioritize user agency by refraining from using nudges that might manipulate user decision-making. We hope this paper will encourage researchers and product developers to reconsider DHBCI design through the lens of antifragility. Future work can examine if DHBCIs that are consistent with our principles of designing for antifragile behavior change lead to better mental health outcomes than other DHBCIs.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.